


Devil’s Bridge

by veeagainst



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Angst, M/M, Smut, Thriller, Wrongful Imprisonment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 11:30:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12530320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veeagainst/pseuds/veeagainst
Summary: R/S Games 2017 - Day 24 - Team SiriusA non-magical AU set in a dystopian world not at all inspired by current events where Voldemort is the UK’s fascist dictator. Sirius is sent to prison as an innocent man and escapes to avenge James and Lily - only to discover that the man he loved knows he is innocent.





	Devil’s Bridge

**Author's Note:**

> **Team:** Sirius  
>  **Title:** Devil’s Bridge  
>  **Rating:** Explicit  
>  **Warnings:** Graphic sexual descriptions. Angst and potentially inappropriate moments of dark humour. One fur coat of unknown species and/or origin.  
>  **Genres:** Adventure, Thriller, Smut, AU  
>  **Word Count:** 30,000  
>  **Summary:** A non-magical AU set in a dystopian world not at all inspired by current events where Voldemort is the UK’s fascist dictator. Sirius is sent to prison as an innocent man and escapes to avenge James and Lily - only to discover that the man he loved knows he is innocent.  
>  **Notes:** Thank you to the Sirius Smut Squad in the Discord chat, to a Beta-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, and another person who very kindly chatted with me a lot during the writing process. Thanks also to Jasper Fforde for his thoughts on dystopian Wales.  
>  **Prompt:** F - picture: four teenage boys sitting on a bench under a sign for Devil's Bridge, Wales  
> 

“These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one”  
― Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

 

***

 

Together, they look upward through the rain at the three bridges collectively known as the Devil’s Bridge, iron and stone and stone, stacked one on top of the other at slightly different angles.

Remus asks, ‘Why do you build a bridge? To span a distance that is otherwise unspannable.’

Sirius looks over at him. ‘That’s not what you said last time.’

‘What did I say?’ Remus grimaces. ‘I barely remember any of it, I was so scared of what we were doing and miserable over you.’

Sirius reaches for his hand and Remus takes it.

‘You said it was stupid to think the Devil built it because anyone could have just laid down a plank.’

Remus bursts into laughter. ‘Oh god. Deep thoughts with Remus Lupin.’

‘Always,’ Sirius says, and, a little hint of truth in his words. ‘Most profound man I’ve ever met.’

‘Still,’ Remus says, looking up at the three bridges, the narrowest of gorges, and the hanging branches: ‘It’s an interesting landmark.’

Sirius squeezes Remus’s hand tightly and says, ‘It’s a landmark for us.’ And he adds, a little melancholy: ‘I’ll always think of it as the place where we stopped being boys.’

***

First, they are just four boys attending a posh public school in the rocky countryside of northern Scotland:  

 

Peter Pettigrew, son and grandson of two successive teachers, who under charitable policies designed to give the middle class a leg up is able to attend for free, although sometimes the headmaster forgets that the intention is for him to go on to a career as something other than a schoolteacher.

Remus Lupin, from a tiny family that is decidedly working class, his father a former miner, now a carpenter, his mother having died when he was very small. Remus is a scholarship boy, but some of the other students whisper that they let him in to be kind, on account of the three scars that cross his face, and the fact that he walks with a slight limp.

James Potter, from one of the wealthiest families in the country, the type renowned for their public works, whose members frequently serve as able politicians with sweeping plans to help the poor. Indeed, it was his uncle who suggested to the school the policy from which Peter benefits. James lives in their first year in a hall named for one of his relatives, and believes he will one day endow another himself, and maybe more scholarships for boys like Peter and Remus, because supporting education for all is the right thing to do.

Finally, there is Sirius Black, also from one of the wealthiest families in the country, but his is a family perpetually in the papers, causing scandal: wrapping Aston Martins around trees, bedding American movie stars on the Riviera, drinking the Ritz dry on a Tuesday morning. They are glamorous and darkly attractive. Their support for Mosely and the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s briefly tarnished their star, but the gossip columnists adore them and the public can’t buy enough papers about them. All the while, many of them have the ears of some of the most prominent right-leaning members of Parliament. Nearly all of them become members of Voldemort’s UK First party shortly after its founding.

School is the usual collection of petty struggles that feel immense at the time. The boys are fast friends, despite their differences, for ineffable reasons of personal chemistry and the forced brotherhood of a random room assignment.

Within months they have built an elaborate, shared fantasy world of spies and hidden identities. James starts it, calling himself Prongs, the noble one, his symbol and signature on their notes the antlers of a stag. Sirius and Remus independently choose canines as their own symbols. Sirius is a dog, Padfoot, because he feels strongly about loyalty to his friends, and likes dogs besides. Remus takes on the name of Moony, a wolf, for reasons that, in his classic manner, he doesn’t articulate. Sirius likes that they are canines together. Peter chooses last, after deliberating for what feels like weeks (actually three days) while they wait to play their game. He chooses Wormtail, a rat.

‘I’m smart just like you lot,’ he explains, ‘but no one believes it. And I’m crafty, and can get places you can’t.’

The game consumes them for years, and they spin increasingly elaborate tales. They construct their own language and use it to make a full map of the school, down to the furniture in most of the rooms, labelled with hiding places, sites of old adventures, and potential dangers to be avoided or confronted depending on their mood.

Early on in their friendship, Sirius, desperately curious about Remus’s scars, digs up an old newspaper article in the school library. He learns that a knife-wielding supporter of the right-wing politician Voldemort attacked three-year-old Remus and his mother because his father had led a mine strike. The attacker was never caught and Remus was permanently scarred and given a limp.

His mother died.

After agonising deliberation, Sirius shares the story with the other two, and then the three of them tell Remus they know. After that, when other students make fun of him – and they do, often, especially when they are younger – the three of them don’t hesitate to retaliate in the strongest terms possible. When sixteen-year-old Sirius runs away from home – his emotionally abusive parents and the generally toxic situation of being in an extended family full of some of Voldemort’s most ardent supporters finally coming to a head – the other three close ranks around him. They are his real family.

Their school years have as a backdrop some of the most tumultuous political times of the twentieth century in Britain. It is ‘a crisis that rivals the Blitz’, as one of the opposition leaders labels it in an interview on BBC 4. The rise of Voldemort and the UK First party is accompanied by increasing violence in the form of extremist attacks that Voldemort never quite condemns, bombings, murders both open and secret, and, finally, in a series of simultaneous explosions in several cities, including one that kills the queen. At school, people are stunned. The news breaks through even into the inner sanctum of fantasy that the four of them occupy, not shattering that world but battering it significantly. Voldemort sweeps to power with a commanding majority in the House of Commons and bullies his legislation through the House of Lords with a handful of powerful allies, including some with the last name Black.

On the day that Voldemort suspends Parliament and declares himself a new Lord Protector, they stand before the TV in their house tea room, just as riveted as everyone else. For the first time, Sirius looks around at the faces of the other students and sees them as just like him and his friends: terrified of the future they are inheriting.

Two weeks later, they take a school trip to central London to see some museums. Sirius expects silent streets, eerie without people, but instead finds the capital feels much as it did when he was a child. Troops loitering on street corners, sometimes accompanied by military vehicles, are the only indication that anything is different.

After the British Museum, their teacher tells them they can spend the afternoon on their own, so long as they make it back to the coach by four.

‘And if you don’t, well, I guess you’ll be spending the night here,’ he says, before waving them on their way.

James wants to linger – he’s been dating a girl named Lily whom Sirius has zero interest in, aside from the fact that she’s ruining their group of friends by hanging around and trying to figure out what they’re talking about – so Sirius demands that they leave immediately. James sulks his way up the street after that, and Sirius talks more animatedly than he would normally just to be irritating.

They turn a corner into a small crowd holding up signs and chanting. It takes Sirius a moment to understand what they are: a gay pride parade. Then he can’t stop staring, his heart thudding against his chest, his palms sweating as he looks at men holding hands, men with their arms around each other. An ocean of want seems to have opened somewhere behind his navel. He thinks he’s going to be sick.

‘Look,’ Peter says, suddenly, and Sirius jumps, forces himself to turn to Peter, and follows his pointing finger to the edge of the park. There’s fast movement, and then he realises that there are skinheads approaching the protesters. The inevitability of violence is heavy in the still air.

 

‘They’re coming this way,’ Peter says. The fear in his voice cuts through the fog in Sirius’s head.

‘I’ll go find a policeman,’ James says, but Remus puts a hand on his arm.

‘I suspect they won’t be much help.’

‘What? Why not?’

Sirius can’t look away as one of the skinheads rips down a signboard reading ‘Gay Pride’. He’s fumbling on the ground with it while the man who was holding it yells at him; then there’s a sudden bright flame, and both men leap away, the one who had it originally still yelling, his voice breaking. Sirius finds that his throat is thick too, tears at the corners of his eyes.

‘The police are mostly infiltrated by fascists,’ Remus says, quietly, matter-of-factly. Sirius can tell that James is stunned; his ability to believe in people is both his best and worst quality.

‘Where are you going?’ Peter calls, and Sirius half turns, trying to make sure no one can see his face, to witness James disappearing into an alley. A moment later he reappears with a bag of rubbish and a triumphant look on his face.

‘Old food,’ he says to them.

‘Let’s get up on that plinth,’ Remus says, pointing to a wide brick platform nearly ten feet off the ground with a tall streetlight set into it.

‘Good idea,’ James says. Sirius doesn’t understand what they’re talking about until the other three are halfway up it, Peter and James reaching to help Remus, who accepts a hand up.

‘Sirius?’ Remus asks. He runs to them, climbing up it too.

The violence at the march is growing, and shifting their way. This seems like a safe place to be. He still doesn’t know why James has gotten this bag of rubbish, which smells utterly foul in the June heat. He can’t seem to think, only to feel, like an enormous bruise that throbs with every touch of air. He wants to fight, but he’s terrified of what it would look like if he did. He stands on the edge of the plinth, clenching his fists. There’s movement behind him, and then James says, sharply, ‘Sirius, _duck_ ,’ as Remus puts a hand on his shoulder and pushes him down to a crouch. A second later, a rotting tomato soars over his head in a beautiful arc. James is, after all, the star of the school rugby team. For a horrible second, Sirius thinks that James has thrown the tomato at the marchers; then it impacts, with a wonderful squelch, on the back of the beefy neck of the man who lit the sign on fire.

The man spins around, looking for the culprit, just as Remus throws a potato at another counter protester. This one hits him in the back with an audible thud and he yells and starts towards them.

‘Um,’ Peter says, sounding frankly terrified, ‘this might not have been our best idea.’

‘No,’ Remus agrees, reaching into the bag and pulling out what appears to be half a rotten squash. ‘But it is certainly satisfying.’ He offers the squash to Sirius. ‘Do you want a go at these fascist fuckers?’

‘Yes,’ Sirius says, licking his suddenly dry lips. The squash is unwieldy in its decayed state, so he waits until one of the counter protesters now running towards them is very close before unleashing it directly into his face. The man sputters and stops, shouting at him as he tries to wipe slimy, rotting organic matter out of his eyes, calling Sirius terrible names that all mean, _gay_.

For the first time, Sirius thinks, _yes, that is me; those words describe me; I am all of those things._

Peter upends the rest of the bag on top of the man’s head, and James shouts, ‘Every man for himself!’ They scatter, instinct kicking in: James off one side of the plinth in a single, well-executed leap, while Peter goes off the other in a clumsy scramble. Both pelt away in opposite directions. Sirius can’t seem to move until Remus grabs the back of his shirt and says in his ear, ‘We really _must_  leave or I think we might be murdered.’

‘Where can we go?’ Sirius gasps, acutely aware that Remus cannot run very fast. ‘You go, Remus, I’ll fight them.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Remus says. ‘Fence?’ Some of the protesters are now hauling themselves up the front of the plinth. At the back of the plinth is a tall, spiked fence that separates them from the private grounds of a large house. Sirius leaps for the top of it and manages to grab the upper crossbar; beside him, Remus does the same. They pull themselves up, the protesters at their heels. It is a delicate manoeuvre to negotiate the spiked top of the fence, but the adrenaline is surging and they manage it. Sirius slides down the other side, hands and feet on two bars, and then staggers backward, holding his arms up to support Remus as he rather unsteadily imitates Sirius’s actions.

‘Sorry,’ Remus gasps as he falls heavily against Sirius, but Sirius shakes his head and drags him away, deeper into the garden. Behind them, they can hear people trying to climb the fence. They run, Sirius slower for Remus, until Remus trips over a root and goes down heavily underneath a large, drooping willow tree.

‘Fuck,’ he gasps.

Sirius falls to his knees beside him, intensely worried for Remus in a way that seems to suck all the air out of his lungs. He reaches out and lays a hand on Remus’s arm.

The ocean of want sloshes dangerously inside of him, and he recoils.

‘I’m ok,’ Remus says. He rolls over onto his back and lies there, clearly trying to get his breath back. ‘I’m ok.’

Sirius, horrified by the sudden internal shadow of need he’s just glimpsed, stands up and paces. ‘Do you think they’re following us?’

‘No,’ Remus says. ‘The police will have stopped them before they can disrupt a place this posh.’

Sirius can’t look at him. He feels filthy, and not just because his hands are still slimy. Shame is coursing through him.

After that day, it becomes his constant companion. Being gay may be legal now – it may be something some people march with pride for – but he can’t bring himself to feel anything but deep mortification about it. Maybe if it wasn’t accompanied by the crippling realisation that he’s going to spend the rest of his life in painful unrequited love for one of his best friends…

 

***

It’s a miracle of the human brain that he can dwell on it at all. Immediately after they leave school, all four are recruited by their former Headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, to join a growing underground resistance against Voldemort. Within two years, they go from peaceful protesters to something much closer to guerrilla fighters. Shortly after the birth of James’s first child, a son, Harry, whom Sirius is godfather to, all four of them are nearly caught in an operation to steal sensitive information from the very heart of the UK First party headquarters. Dumbledore decides that things are too hot for them in Britain and arranges for them to travel to the Republic of Ireland and train with some fighters there.

They travel in secret to Holyhead to take the ferry to Dublin, with a single stop one night at a safe house east of Aberystwyth. At this point, Cardiff has signalled its intention to break away from Voldemort’s England and Scotland, but the civil war that will eventually see the ancient line of Offa’s Dyke heavily mined has not yet begun.

On the road to the safe house, Sirius sits frozen in terror, irrationally certain that if he moves they’ll be caught. Beside him in the backseat, Peter is silent, head turned to look out the window, his jaw obviously clenched in profile. James up front is struggling to read the map, while Remus drives on, calm and steady, not even flinching when a rabbit runs across the road far ahead. Sirius flinches for him, and holds onto the seat more tightly.

The safe house is just outside the tiny village of Rhayader. After what feels like years, they pass through the village and over a bridge over the River Wye before James says, ‘I think this is it.’

‘I thought it was north of this road?’ Remus asks, still in that calm voice.

‘Um,’ James says, and flips the map around.

Peter reaches forward, takes it from him without a word, and after a moment says to Remus, ‘Yes, it is, we’ll go up here just a bit and then there’ll be a curve and you’ll turn north.’

They do, and Remus does, turning down a narrow lane between towering hedges. The car feels unbearably noisy on the gravel drive, but Sirius can still hear his own deep, shaky breaths over it. The house rises out of the darkness suddenly, surprisingly tall and ornate where Sirius had expected a cottage.

‘Nice digs,’ James murmurs, looking out the window. Sirius wants to scream at him to shut up.

They find the keys exactly where they’d been told they would and step inside.

‘Close the curtains,’ Remus says, stilling James’s hand as he’s fumbling for the cord to turn on the lights. ‘And keep the lights down.’

The lights are not a problem, as they quickly discover that the house has no power. It is also freezing cold. Four candelabras with candles are neatly laid out on the kitchen counter. They go exploring through the dark hallways and creaking stairs, trying to be silent and failing, huddled together. Peter takes a bedroom immediately off the stairs and says he’s going to nap for a few minutes; James takes the next one, and Remus the next, leaving Sirius alone with the master bedroom at the end of the hall.

Peeking through the curtains, he sees that it overlooks a ruined and overgrown garden. He pulls them shut and places the heaviest book from the bedside table atop the overlapping fabric where it lies on the floor. That seems to hold them together. He sets the candelabra down on the table and examines the room. It contains only a bed with heavy curtains to close around it, the single table, stacked with books of all sorts, and an enormous wardrobe. Narnia flashes through his mind, and he knows if he doesn’t look into it, it will haunt him all night.

Inside is women’s clothing, all of it clearly designed for someone matronly, with rather eclectic but expensive taste. Sirius pulls out a ballgown studded with multi-coloured beads that sparkle prettily in the candlelight. Beside it is a huge, heavy, fur coat.

He leaves the bedroom and goes back to the kitchen, where James is sitting and staring at his hands in an uncharacteristically – for James – pensive look.

‘I miss Lily and Harry,’ he says to Sirius, plaintive.

‘I know,’ Sirius says. ‘We won’t be long.’ In reality, he has no idea how long they’ll be, and they both know it.

If they’re caught, they’ll be an eternity.

They find wine, and rapidly work their way through a bottle before Peter and Remus reappear. With empty stomachs, Sirius is already on his way to sloshed and James, helplessly giggling when Peter suggests they made some dinner, seems to already be there.

‘Christ, you two are lightweights,’ Peter says, visibly annoyed.

Remus opens the pantry. Sirius can’t help but notice that he’s leaning against the counter to take the weight off his bad leg; with a pang, he wonders if driving is painful for him. His sense of Remus is always heightened when he’s drunk.

‘Looks like they’ve left us some pasta sauce and noodles,’ Remus says. ‘Shall we?’

‘Do we have water?’ Peter asks, and then he and Remus are off and making dinner. It is clear they do not need James and Sirius involved, which is for the best, because neither of them knows how to cook a thing.

‘I’m going to dress for dinner,’ Sirius announces, trying to escape the unbearable tension he’s suddenly feeling. ‘James, come with me.’

‘Sure,’ James says, giggling.

‘Don’t burn the place down,’ Remus says. Sirius isn’t sure if his tone is fond.

Upstairs, Sirius shows James the wardrobe. As expected, James is fully into the prank, and they dress lavishly in the woman’s clothing, James in an Indian-inspired gown that appears to date from the Raj and Sirius, of course, in the ballgown. They drape themselves in the large costume jewellery they find in a chest at the back of the wardrobe, including an ostrich feather headband for James and a heavy net studded with fake pearls that lays over Sirius’s hair.

‘How do I look, darling?’ James asks, laying his hand on Sirius’s arm, waiting to be escorted.

‘Beautiful,’ Sirius intones solemnly, fluttering his eyelashes one last time at the mirror and wondering if Remus will think he’s pretty. ‘Wait, I need my coat,’ he says, pulling away from James to tug the heavy fur coat from its hangar and drape it around himself. ‘Now then.’

‘Stunning as ever,’ James says, and they process down the stairs to the table.

‘Oh my god,’ is Peter’s reaction. Remus is unreadable, to Sirius’s immense frustration. ‘You two,’ Peter continues, and then he starts laughing. ‘I’m so glad I’m here with you.’

James finds more wine. Bottles seem to be more abundant than food in the house. The four of them drink deeply, barely eating the pasta. At some point James stands up, sways, and says that he must sleep; Peter follows not long after.

Sirius is itchy as hell in the gown, annoyed by the thing on his head, and aware that clomping around in his boots is not exactly how the ensemble was meant to be worn. The joke is over, but he stays long past the smart point, and then long past the point where a hangover becomes inevitable, and stays even until it will be a bloody awful one at that. He cannot seem to leave Remus, who appears intent on drinking the house dry in inscrutable silence. The candles burn low until they sit in near darkness.

‘Sirius,’ Remus says finally, and Sirius hears a note of finality in his name: Remus is done with whatever this is. He is about to move on to something else. Sirius snaps to focus, or at least tries to, and finds that Remus is giving him a look that makes his head swim even more than it already is. ‘Why are you wearing that ridiculous outfit?’

‘It seemed fun,’ Sirius says. Even in this state, he is acutely aware that this action could be construed as a bit, er, _homosexual_ , so he adds, ‘James did it too.’

‘Sirius,’ Remus says. He shifts his chair and Sirius becomes instantly aware of how physically close they are. And then Remus says, ‘Padfoot,’ the childhood nickname, one they haven’t used much since they left school, and which they’d really stopped using a bit before, when games about spying and codenames had stopped seeming fun.

‘Moony?’ Sirius asks, unsure of what he’s asking. The tide inside of him is still only pulled by a single gravitational object, and it is currently close enough to kiss.

‘I don’t want to die,’ Remus says.

That wasn’t on Sirius’s mind at all. He says the obvious: ‘Me either.’

Remus leans forward. ‘We might tomorrow. Or the day after, or the day after.’

Sirius is confused about what they’re talking about. ‘That was always a possibility.’

‘Not like now.’

Sirius shakes his head, a little helpless. ‘I wish I could do something for you. To make you – to make you feel better.’

‘Let’s go upstairs,’ Remus whispers.

And then he reaches out and takes Sirius’s hand.

Sirius follows in a daze as Remus leads him up the wide stairs. Outside his own bedroom, Remus pauses, and says, ‘This place feels haunted.’ He is still holding Sirius’s hand. ‘I don’t want to sleep alone.’

‘Come with me,’ Sirius suggests, hope suddenly warm inside of him, so thick he’s almost unable to speak the words.

They go into the master bedroom, and Remus shuts the door. Sirius knows he is drunk but the sudden intensity of the moment is making him feel sober. ‘Shall we go to bed?’ he asks. His own boldness terrifies him.

‘In that?’ Remus replies, and he steps forward so they are very close and puts his hands on Sirius’s bare shoulders inside the fur coat. ‘I think you’ll be hot.’

‘And itchy,’ Sirius agrees, inanely. Everything inside of him is panic, panic, panic.

‘Let’s take it off,’ Remus suggests, and he pushes it off Sirius’s shoulders and then bursts into laughter. ‘Oh, that dress.’

Sirius, desperate that this not go wrong, says, ‘It was James’s idea.’

‘That you went along with,’ Remus points out, but he’s grinning.

‘Well, you know,’ Sirius says, breathless. ‘James. Me. Ideas.’

‘I know that very well,’ Remus says, and then his voice dips into a lower octave. ‘But you can’t sleep in this either.’

‘No,’ Sirius agrees, just to be agreeable, because, _oh god_. ‘Beads all over the bed, that kind of thing.’

‘You could take it off,’ Remus suggests.

‘James did the buttons,’ Sirius explains. ‘I don’t think I can reach them.’ He pauses. Does Remus – does Remus mean – _what does Remus mean?_  Remus seems to want something more from him, which feels wildly unreasonable at this point. ‘Could you help?’

Remus hesitates – they look into each other’s eyes, and Sirius searches, but still isn’t sure what he’s seeing – then says, simply, ‘Yes.’ His hands remain on Sirius’s shoulders, and he gently spins him around, the heavy skirt wrapping around Sirius’s legs as he does so. Sirius is suddenly jelly, liable to collapse if Remus stops touching him.

Remus starts laughing, and puts his forehead on Sirius’s bare upper back. ‘What a faff!’ he huffs. ‘He’s done something terrible to this dress.’

‘What?’ Sirius can barely form words with Remus’s forehead warm and right there.

‘He’s just utterly fucked this up. I’m not sure he knows how buttons work,’ Remus says, and a second later Sirius feels Remus’s hands on him. His touch is warm, and soft, and deft, and something about the lower back – an area Sirius had not previously understood to be erotic – seems to be directly connected to the cock. Amidst the panic, Sirius is now so hard that it hurts. He thinks fleetingly that he feels bad for what they’re doing to this woman’s dress, especially when she’s letting them use her house.

Then Remus’s head shifts, his hair against Sirius’s back like feathers, and he puts his warm lips on Sirius’s neck. Sirius moans involuntarily and Remus draws back a fraction and whispers, so that his damp mouth ghosts against Sirius’s burning hot skin, ‘Is this all right?’

Sirius feels they are at a tipping point. 'Yes,’ he whispers. He wants to add a _Ulysses_ quote but decides it might be too much.

Remus slides his hands inside the dress now, apparently having freed the buttons. They roam around Sirius’s stomach, up to his chest and shoulders, and then push the dress off. The silky fabric slithers down his body and pools around his boots. Remus unclasps the heavy necklace he’s wearing and that falls to the floor too; then Remus lifts the faux pearl chain off his head and tosses that to the side. Sirius is now wearing nothing above his feet but briefs that have gotten painfully tight in the front.

‘I’m going to trip,’ Sirius whispers, no idea why he’s so fascinated by logistics right now. ‘The skirt… my boots…’

‘Oh,’ Remus says, and suddenly he’s kneeling before Sirius, and leaning his head against Sirius’s thigh. Sirius realises through a haze of lust that Remus is untying his shoelaces, his mouth mere inches from Sirius’s very erect cock. Sirius makes a garbled noise and Remus eases his feet out of the boots and stands.

‘Bed?’ he asks, breathing like he’s run a race. Sirius reaches out and grabs Remus’s clothes inexpertly. Remus puts his hands over Sirius’s as Sirius starts to tug his jumper up over his head. ‘Listen, don’t be startled by what you see,’ Remus says. ‘And if you’re not – if you don’t-‘

‘I won’t and I don’t,’ Sirius says, nonsensically, dragging the jumper off, mussing all of Remus’s gorgeous hair in the process, and setting to work on the buttons of his shirt. There are scars under there, he realises, similar to the ones on Remus’s face. He kisses them, and Remus’s neck, because he really wants to kiss Remus’s mouth but he’s too scared to do it yet. Remus is running his hands up and down Sirius’s back. Sirius forces the buckle open on Remus’s belt and then undoes the buttons on his trousers and shoves the whole mass of fabric and leather and metal down, leaving just his briefs. Remus kicks off his shoes and his clothes and Sirius sees the scar on his leg, the twisted mass of muscle that looks painful, and he longs to kiss it too. He wants Remus to know that he’s beautiful.

‘How should we,’ he asks, but Remus is already climbing up onto the bed. Sirius follows him, thinking that he’d like to touch him everywhere. Remus pulls him onto his lap, so that Sirius is straddling his groin. Sirius can feel Remus’s cock pressing against him through their briefs, and that seems rather forward, so in a haze he bends down and kisses him, on the mouth, his first kiss with a man, so his first kiss that means anything.

At first, he’s gentle, barely touching their lips together, his eyes shut, his whole body leaning away so he doesn’t put down all his weight – so he doesn’t fully commit, so when Remus realises the mistake he’s making and pushes him away, he won’t fall – but Remus kisses him back, hard and frantic. Remus’s tongue is hot, shoving into Sirius’s mouth, and Sirius rapidly sinks down into it. He runs his hands up and down Remus’s arms, clenching around the tight muscles there, and saying nonsense words against Remus’s mouth. Then Remus shoves him and they wind up on their sides, their legs entwined. Remus leans back and runs his hand down Sirius’s face from ear to chin. His eyes are searching all over Sirius’s face, Sirius isn’t sure what for. He hopes not for a glimpse of someone else. He hopes that he’s not just an available easy fuck.

‘Remus,’ he whispers, willing himself to shut up.

‘What?’ Remus moves close, presses their mouths together again, his hands sliding down Sirius’s body to rest on his waist. He dips a finger, then two, below the waistband of Sirius’s briefs, light, teasing, and asks again: ‘What?’

Sirius puts one of his hands on Remus’s face, his palm cupping his cheek, running his finger along the hard line of the bone. He is consumed by a desire to touch every inch of this man’s body. Why can’t he stop talking? ‘Would you do this if you weren’t drunk?’

‘I don’t know,’ Remus says. ‘Yes. No. I’m never this reckless.’ He pushes himself forward, so their cocks rub together. Sirius grinds involuntarily and Remus puts his whole hand inside his briefs now, sliding it down to grip the hard rise of his hipbone. ‘But even,’ he says, his gaze so intense that it feels like it’s burning through Sirius’s eyes into his soul to leave a forever mark, ‘if I didn’t do it,’ he presses their lips together again, and bites the corner of Sirius’s mouth, just hard enough to feel, before lapping the bump it raises with his tongue, ‘fuck, I’d want to.’ His hand on Sirius’s hipbone is so strong, so big, the palm holding Sirius down as Remus grinds his hips into him again. ‘What do you want?’ he asks, his mouth now crushed against Sirius’s jaw, his words slurred.

Sirius wants to say, ‘you’ more than he’s ever wanted to say anything, but instead he says, ‘This,’ because the implications behind a proper noun rather than a pronoun are too terrifying.

‘I don’t want to die,’ Remus says against his mouth, and Sirius thinks that’s the best explanation he’s going to get for the sudden interest. He wants to say, ‘I don’t want to die without you knowing how much I love you,’ and he wants Remus to say it back, but he does not want to fuck this up with words. He puts his hand inside his own briefs so that his palm is over the back of Remus’s hand on his hip and clutches at his taut fingers. He hopes that his body will speak louder than the words he’s too scared to say. He moves his leg so it covers Remus, wrapping it around his waist, his cock now pressed against Remus’s upper thigh. Remus makes a surprised noise and clenches his hand on Sirius’s hip before moving it down and grabbing his ass, shoving him harder. The friction of Sirius’s briefs is fucking killing him, and he’s so close to coming…

‘I’m going to,’ Remus says against his ear, where he’s been doing something by turns tender and violent with his mouth, ‘is this…?’ and he shoves them over so that he’s mostly on top of Sirius, grinding down into him. His cock feels huge and heavy, leaving a wet trail through his briefs on Sirius’s stomach.

‘This is,’ Sirius agrees, arching his neck and back, trying to hold it together. Then he feels Remus’s free hand on his other thigh, his fingers suddenly stretching the elastic of his briefs at the top of his leg. The skin there is so sensitive it makes him want to scream…

‘Shh,’ Remus gasps.

‘Sorry,’ Sirius moans, ‘don’t want to wake the other two…’

‘I’m worried you’ll wake the bloody dead,’ Remus hisses, kissing him again, hard and definitive. He arches up and his hand is now fully inside of Sirius’s briefs, and then his hand is on Sirius’s balls, just a stroke, upward, to his shaft, wrapping around it, this is too good, this is too much, as Remus tugs his cock out of the leg of his briefs and returns to pressing against it.

‘May I,’ Sirius manages, so close to coming that he’s not sure he’s going to get to touch Remus before he does.

‘I didn’t ask for permission,’ Remus huffs against his ear. ‘Stop acting like you’re imposing on me.’

Touching Remus’s cock would be somewhere above the ninth level of Paradiso, if Sirius were Dante. He puts his free hand into Remus’s briefs and wraps his palm around its heavy, hot length. He runs his thumb around the tight head, smearing the thick liquid there, and wraps his hand around it, giving it a hard tug, the way he’s imagined while touching himself.

‘You’ve thought about this,’ Remus says into his ear. ‘About touching cocks.’

‘Of course I fucking have,’ Sirius admits, reckless, fucking into Remus’s leg.

‘When?’ Remus asks. His mouth is along Sirius’s jawline, hot breath igniting Sirius’s skin.

And Sirius is beyond caution now, so he blurts: ‘When I think about you.’

‘Fuck,’ Remus says, sounding genuinely surprised. ‘Sirius.’ His cock throbs in Sirius’s hand. ‘I want to,’ and he pushes down against him harder than he has before, and Sirius gets his hand caught between them, barely able to move it, as they rut against each other. Thinking goes out the window, replaced by frantic movement, the edge coming, inevitable as a waterfall. Sirius comes so hard that the edges of his vision flare. Remus’s face is buried in his neck, and somehow their hands on Sirius’s hip have become so tightly intertwined that it’s painful. In the shock of feeling and sensitive skin that arrives as Sirius’s heart rate finally slows, he manages to unclench their hands. Remus moans into his neck and Sirius tightens his legs around his waist until Remus pushes him away and sits up.

‘Oh, fuck,’ he says, flopping his head back against the wall. ‘What day is it? What country is this? What’s my name?’

Sirius rolls onto his stomach and tugs Remus’s legs apart, crawling between them and laying his head on Remus’s thigh. Remus’s hands descend and rest in Sirius’s hair, heavy but gentle, massaging his head lightly. Sirius kisses the impossibly soft skin of Remus’s inner leg, then ducks his head lower and puts his mouth over the area covered in sticky cum. He hears Remus gasp, and feels his hands clench in his hair, but he will do this until Remus tells him not to – he pushes himself up slightly on one hand and licks everywhere he can, tasting the heavy, salty taste of Remus until he is clean. Then he tucks his now half-hard cock back into his briefs and puts his head back onto his thigh, rolling slightly to look up at him. Remus is looking down at him with a half-smile on his face, the most beautiful thing Sirius has ever seen.

‘The sun is going to come up, isn’t it?’ Remus asks. They move together and Remus drags the heavy duvet up and over them. Sirius spoons against him, holding him as close as he can, and Remus falls asleep soon, but Sirius lies awake, consumed with doubt about Remus’s motives, until just before sunrise, when he falls into fitful, already hungover, anxious sleep.

Remus is of course gone when Sirius wakes, groggy after finally having achieved some measure of black, heavy sleep after the sun rose. He sits up in bed and the hangover comes rushing in, sticky mouthed and miserable. He slouches out of bed. His briefs are a sticky disaster, but they’re also the only ones he has with him. He wants Remus in an unspecified way – either his cock or his presence, doesn’t matter which – so much his skin hurts – or maybe that’s the dehydration. He pulls on his clothing from the day before, hanging up the woman’s dress and grabbing her fur coat at the last minute, pulling it over his shoulders. He finds a pair of huge sunglasses and puts those on too. He needs armour against this world.

Downstairs, James and Peter are closing the place up, preparing to leave.

‘Where’s Remus?’ Sirius asks, making his entrance into the kitchen, giving a flourish with the edge of his coat. Panic, his constant companion except for a few brief moments last night, has returned, thick in his throat.

‘He’s working on the car,’ James says. ‘It had a flat when we went out this morning.’ James stares at him. ‘Why on earth are you wearing that coat again?’

‘It’s about fucking aesthetics, not that I’d expect you to understand that,’ Sirius snarls. He looks to the door. ‘I’ll go help Remus.’

‘In that?’ Peter asks, doubtful.

‘We’re done in here anyway,’ James says, and Sirius knows, resigned, that there’s nothing for it. The other two follow him outside. Remus is just finishing, wiping his greasy hands on a cloth. Sirius longs for his touch. Remus looks up at him, and blinks twice, eyes a little wide, before they slide away and he asks, ‘Are we ready?’

James gets in the passenger seat without question and Sirius hates him for it. He and Peter take the back and Remus, the only one who can drive, gets awkwardly into the driver’s seat. Sirius can’t read him; he’s a book written not just in a foreign language but in one that uses a character system he’s never seen before.

Remus backs out of the driveway and onto the road. Peter has the map and Sirius tries to look out the window. Fuck, he’s hungover.

The day is a deep, low-hanging grey. They leave behind any trees very quickly and enter open hilly upland, devoid of features aside from rolling waves of grass and the narrow line of black road surface. Fog hangs very low, but the open space around them is anxiety-inducing. Sirius remembers why they’re there: they’re literally fleeing their old lives to go to a guerrilla training camp. And he, Sirius, is so useless that all he can think about is the taste of Remus’s body… he tries to focus on what they’re fighting for but eventually it’s no use.

‘Pull over,’ he says, the first to break the silence in nearly an hour. ‘I’m going to be sick.’

‘We’re almost,’ Remus starts, and Sirius snaps, ‘Now.’

‘There’s a hedge,’ Peter cries as Remus jerks the wheel and the car mounts the verge. Sirius can’t even open the door due to hedge proximity, so he rolls down the window and leans out. James conscientiously grabs the sunglasses from his face before they can fall. Sirius retches, doing his best not to hit the side of the car, and what comes out looks an awful lot like wine and not at all like food. A car passes them, very close, and Remus says, voice tense, ‘Are you ready to go?’

Sirius flops back inside, his head wet from the fog, which is approaching rain. Remus pulls away without an answer, but turns off very shortly thereafter.

‘What are you doing?’ James demands.

‘Let’s get some air,’ Remus says, violently putting the car into a tiny car park and yanking the handbrake before the car has fully stopped moving. He is out of the car with shocking speed for his leg, the door slammed before Sirius has even registered what is happening.

‘What the fuck?’ Peter asks.

‘Where are we?’ James asks.

Sirius, whose head is spinning from the violent manoeuvre, opens his door and exits the vehicle into tourist hell. The narrow roadway is lined with a tearoom, a gift shop, and a massive advert for Cornettos. There’s the inevitable red phone booth and two enormous signs proclaiming, in English and he assumes the same in Welsh, ‘Devil’s Bridge, World Famous Falls.’

‘Are they famous?’ James asks, having also exited the car now. ‘Only I’ve never heard of them.’

‘Has Remus lost his mind?’ Peter demands. ‘We don’t have time to dawdle.’

Sirius pulls the fur coat more closely around himself. It’s bloody freezing out here, and damp too. Remus is limping away in the direction of the Falls, and Sirius, of course, knows he is going to follow him. He’s resigned now to following Remus wherever he goes.

The main attraction is down a rickety staircase, but somehow, Remus beats them to its base and Sirius finds him standing and looking out at an incredibly narrow, grey stone gorge crossed by three bridges, one on top of the other, offset at strange angles. There’s a little plaque explaining the scene. Remus is staring at the bridges and seems like he isn’t going to speak or even look at Sirius, so Sirius leans forward and reads the plaque.

‘What are you learning?’ James asks.

‘The lowest one was built around the year 1000,’ Sirius says.

‘That’s old, I guess. Impressive.’ James sounds like it’s really anything but.

‘It was built by the devil,’ Sirius continues.

‘What?’ James sounds thoroughly taken aback.

‘It was too hard for humans to build the bridge, so Satan himself decided to,’ Sirius says, still reading, ‘though the reason why he might want to do it and why he waited until the year 1000 is not given.’

Remus snorts. Sirius tries to sound neutral as he asks, ‘Anything to add, Remus?’

‘Seems bloody stupid that the devil would have to build it,’ Remus says. ‘It’s a narrow enough gorge, you could drop a plank across it.’

‘Why are we here?’ Peter asks, very plaintive. ‘We really need to go. We’re due at the ferry at Holyhead.’ He drops his voice. ‘The longer we’re in you-know-who’s Britain…’

‘I wanted air,’ Remus says, the bite in his voice evidence. ‘Let’s go.’

James gives Sirius a confused look. ‘How late did you two stay up?’

‘Let’s _go_ ,’ Remus repeats, and he sets off again up the stairs. Sirius takes a deep breath and follows him.

At the top of the stairs, James suddenly says, ‘Wait.’ The other three turn obediently to look at him. He’s pulled a small camera out of his pocket. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘this might be our last time – you know. Here. Together. For a while.’

‘Forever,’ Remus says, quietly enough that only Sirius can hear him.

‘Let’s just,’ James says, and then he talks a German woman there with her trekking poles into taking their photo. They sit beneath a sign proclaiming that they are 680 metres above sea level – all metres that Sirius knows they will have to shed before the day is done – along a bench. There’s train tracks behind them, because there’s a little rail line that goes to the town of Pontarfynach. The sun emerges, very briefly, and they squint. She takes their photograph, they troop back to the car, and they leave. The silence in the car is expansive.

They ditch the car in a field outside Holyhead and Sirius leaves the fur coat and sunglasses behind; they can’t be conspicuous now. The tall grass in the field is soaked, and soon they are too, in a cold, miserable drizzle that gets under their collars and inside their hats. In town, they find their contact, who lets James into his stone cottage to make a phone call. The other three stand outside, huddled together by a hedge, and try to blow warmth into their hands. Sirius is increasingly desperate to speak with Remus, who has been unusually silent since they left the bridge.

James returns; the news from London is bad. They’re going to stop the ferry service because too many people are fleeing. They have to get on this one. They hurry down unfamiliar streets, trying to follow signs to the docks written in Welsh, and eventually find them by looking for the cloud of cartwheeling seagulls, white against the leaden sky. The dock is in chaos, as refugees desperate to get onto the ferry surge and heave towards it. Somehow they make it to the gangplank; James gives Dumbledore’s name and they are ushered onboard, where it is standing room only. Sirius finds himself pressed up against a railing, looking back at the land.

‘Please,’ a woman is sobbing, holding up a tiny child towards the boat. ‘Please.’ Beside her a man holds up another child, his face grim, set. He seems to feel that these children won’t be making it to freedom. Sirius thinks of Harry, left behind in hiding with Lily, and leans over the rail.

‘Give them to me,’ he calls. ‘I can take them.’

The people around him are not pleased; it is already unclear if the ferry can leave, riding as low in the water as it is. Sirius is leaning out as far as he can, feet hooked tightly in the lower rail, and he manages to get one of the children. The ferry engines are firing, the boat shifting in its moorings. Sirius looks around, frantic to set her down somewhere safe, and as he turns he nearly collides with Remus, who has appeared behind him. Wordlessly, Remus holds out his arms, and Sirius nestles the little girl into them. They share a long look, Sirius trying to convey how much he loves Remus with just his eyes and the set of his mouth, and then Sirius turns back. The man has climbed the side of the boat and is pushing the other child up towards him. This one is even younger, and sobbing hysterically. Sirius grabs her tiny arms and pulls her upward as the boat lurches forward. He feels a hand grab his belt loop and pull him back onto the deck, hard: Remus, of course, who puts a hand on his lower back and steers him towards a more protected area where James and Peter are waiting.

Sirius holds the child in his arms tightly and rocks her.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘I know. I feel the same way.’

The crossing is the worst experience of Sirius’s life thus far, utter misery in stormy seas, the boat riding so low that people are bailing it continuously. There’s a rumour going around the deck that Dublin won’t take them when they land, and that they’ll be left adrift. Sirius sits against a wall with the children, numb with cold and fatigue, keeping them warm inside his coat. He counts down the hours: it was only twelve hours ago that Remus was sliding his fingers inside of the fur coat. Now only thirteen hours ago. Now fourteen…

‘Land in sight!’ someone calls, and Remus appears at his side, sliding down the wall to sit beside him.

‘We’re close,’ he says in Sirius’s ear.

‘Thank god,’ Sirius mutters. He looks over at Remus, who is staring straight ahead. He’s desperate to talk to him but too scared to initiate it. Then one of the children starts crying again and he says, helplessly, ‘I don’t know what to do with them.’

‘We’ll figure it out,’ Remus says. ‘Don’t worry.’ The boat slows and they can hear yelling. Remus still doesn’t look at him. ‘Help me up, would you?’ But his hand in Sirius’s as he pulls him to his feet is warm, and Sirius thinks there’s an extra squeeze in the hold, a lingering moment that feels deliberate…

Then they are swept up in a storm of preparation. They stay in barracks, never alone. Sirius gets shipped out without the other three to Ballycastle, taking up position in a ruined monastery on the beach and keeping artillery on British ships alongside several hardened Irish soldiers. People question Sirius for his accent and last name, treat him worse than anyone else. He takes it, comes to relish it. He’s worthless and he knows it. No one could ever love him, and not because of something he can change – he is wrong from his very core. When he goes back to Britain – landing under cover of darkness in an old smuggler’s cove along the coast of Cornwall, with the other three plus five more trained with them, he’s become nothing but a soldier, or so he hopes.

He and Remus have never spoken of the night in the safe house again, and now months have passed. If there’s awkwardness, Sirius thinks that only he feels it, because Remus treats him exactly as he always has – as a best friend, nothing more. Sirius lies awake sometimes going over the details of their encounter. It starts to lose its reality. He writes down what he remembers, which seems to fictionalise it further, and then is embarrassed by possessing a written account of what had transpired. He burns the paper.

Voldemort’s grasp is tightening, despite their best efforts. James is an outspoken critic, using his social position to press back against the Resident Aliens Registry and the measures taken to marginalise the disabled because they are not doing their fair share of work. Sirius is visiting James and Lily, holding now-toddler Harry on his knee, when Dumbledore comes to tell them that they need to consider fleeing the country.

‘I’m not leaving,’ James says, flatly. ‘This is my home as much as its those bastards’.’

Dumbledore sighs. ‘I rather thought you’d say that.’

Sirius looks between them, and then down at Harry. ‘How can we protect you?’ he asks quietly.

‘What about going into hiding?’ Dumbledore suggests. ‘Travelling between safe houses.’

James and Lily agree to this because of Harry. Sirius, Remus, and Peter are all part of the effort to guard them. Things become more complicated; someone perhaps one step outside of the five of them seems to be a spy, sharing their secrets. There are close calls and several people in the resistance are captured, tortured, and killed.

One night late in October, Sirius, Remus, and James (Peter having had some important business to conduct) stay up late, drinking long after Lily has gone to bed. Remus is trying to convince James that they should move on again, and soon.

‘Your voice is powerful in the resistance,’ Remus urges him. ‘You have to stay safe.’

‘When does it become enough, though?’ James demands. ‘I used to be out there fighting, now I’m trapped inside? Just supposed to make statements about how terrible Voldemort is? Anyone who doesn’t realise that by now…’

‘It becomes enough when his police force isn’t actively trying to murder you,’ Remus says. His hand on the table is clenched into a fist. Sirius longs, as ever, to touch it. ‘When you and your family can live your lives without fear.’

‘And when is that?’ Remus doesn’t have a good answer, and just shrugs and shakes his head. James slams his palm down and takes a deep breath. ‘I can’t stay in hiding forever,’ he snarls.

‘Just be safe,’ Sirius whispers, a prayer, because this world seems mainly composed of darkness punctuated by stunning moments of light and the main thing he’s learned from being a resistance fighter is that he doesn’t want anyone, especially not his friends, to die.

James goes to bed soon after. Remus disappears to the toilet and when he hasn’t returned in several minutes, Sirius, sick of being left with his own desolate thoughts, stands and goes to look for him. He finds him lying on his side on the sofa, eyes open, a haunted look on his face. Sirius is struck by the realisation that this is the first time he and Remus will have been alone together since the safe house.

‘Are you all right?’ he asks softly.

Remus shrugs one shoulder and visibly swallows. And then, to Sirius’s complete shock, he scoots himself back on the sofa, pressing into the cushions, so that there is space for another person. ‘Sirius,’ he says, voice rough, ‘will you come here?’

Sirius has been telling himself for nearly a year now that – what, that he’s over this? No, not that, but that the safe house was a one off, and that he had just been a warm body to Remus that night… His heart starts thudding in his chest with that familiar sick feeling. He sits on the sofa, and Remus presses his face into his hip, so he puts his head down onto Remus’s soft hair. He runs his fingers through it and feels the waves in it as Remus breathes deeply against his body. Sirius thinks that Remus might be crying. He slides down until he is lying beside him, and rolls onto his side. Remus’s breath smells like beer, and Sirius assumes his does as well. Up close, Sirius can see blonde stubble along Remus’s jawline and the deep, purple circles under his eyes. He is genuinely dazzled by how gorgeous he looks.

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Remus says. He stretches upward and twists the switch on the lamp standing on the table beside the sofa so that the room goes dark. Sirius’s heart is now beating so loudly that he’s certain Remus can hear it in the still room, but all Remus does is throw his arm around Sirius’s waist and close his eyes. Sirius is terrified to move for fear that Remus will realise this is a mistake.

‘I’m sorry we never talked,’ Remus whispers into the dark.

‘It’s no matter,’ Sirius whispers back, even though it has mattered to him very much. He tilts his head forward so that their foreheads touch lightly, leaving the opportunity of a kiss open to Remus.

‘Goodnight,’ is all Remus says, and then he seems to fall almost instantly into a deep sleep. After a few moments, Sirius takes Remus’s hand that is not around his waist – this one is curled under his chin – and hooks his index finger through Remus’s. He shuts his eyes and for the first time in months sleeps through the night.

He wakes when he hears someone moving in the kitchen. They’ve become more tangled in their unconscious states, and his face is in Remus’s hair, his hand fully in Remus’s. He looks at Remus’s face – the way he’s always wanted to, drinking in the details, trying to memorise it. He thinks extensively about kissing his slightly open mouth. Then whomever is in the kitchen rattles a pot and to his sudden panic and shame he realises that this person had to walk past the two of them sleeping to get into there. He disentangles himself as quickly but gently as he can – Remus, who has always been able to sleep for England, does not stir – and enters the kitchen.

James is sitting at the table with a cup of tea. Sirius sits opposite. James slides the teacup to him and pours himself another from the kettle on the table.

‘Thanks,’ Sirius says. ‘Good morning.’

‘Yeah,’ James says, ‘was it?’

‘What?’

‘Sirius,’ James says, with his most classic _James-knows-better-than-you face_. ‘You and Remus? Is there something happening there I should know about?’

Sirius’s extremities go cold. ‘No,’ he lies instinctively, as he always has when asked any question that might touch on his sexuality – even to James.

James gives him a look that seems both incredulous and a bit pitying. ‘I mean…’

‘We’re both just stressed,’ Sirius babbles. ‘You know.’

‘Yeah,’ James agrees, ‘that’s why I like snuggling up next to my _wife_.’

Sirius looks at James, his stomach in knots. ‘James, it’s not like that.’ This is not technically a lie. They are definitely not like James and his _wife_. After all, Sirius assumes that James and Lily have discussed their feelings for each other.

‘Whatever it’s like,’ James says, holding up his hands, ‘I don’t – I don’t really care. I want you both to be happy. And for me to get to take the piss.’

‘It’s…’ Sirius puts his head in his hands. He’s mortified and touched. ‘Thanks, James.’

 

***

That night, Remus leaves with several other members of the Resistance on a mission to the Welsh border. Wales is waging a fairly successful war to break free from England’s grasp – Scotland having been more heavily fought for due to the stationing of much of the Royal Navy there – and Dumbledore wants Remus to aid the Welsh in harrying the English flank. It seems just barely possible that Liverpool might be had, which is a glittering prize of industrial capacity and symbolic wealth. If they can convince the North to rise up, they could cut off English access to Scapa…

Sirius does not get to say goodbye to Remus; he misses his leaving because he is checking out the car they will use to take James, Lily, and Harry to a new safe house. The car worries him; its hidden compartments seem desperately obvious to the trained eye. He knows that he’s supposed to take this on himself but he feels that he needs help. He steps inside to ring Peter. Waiting for the phone to connect, he pushes down his feelings of desperate disappointment upon hearing that Remus has gone without saying goodbye to him. Peter arrives shortly after, and, together, they manage to navigate through the maze of checkpoints and roadblocks without incident, bringing the small family to the safe house at Godric’s Hollow.

Peter has seemed desperately tense lately, and when he asks Sirius to get a pint with him, Sirius instantly acquiesces, both for the company and in the hopes of relieving some of the terrible pressure that he knows they are both under, if just for a night. One pint turns into more, and somehow they wind up talking about the possible spy, and who it might be.

They are four pints and a whisky deep when Peter suggests it might be Remus.

Sirius almost decks him. He restrains himself to a half-shouted, ‘What the _fuck_?’ that makes the bartender look up from polishing his glasses.

‘Not because he’s working for Voldemort,’ Peter says hastily. 'Because we’re not being violent enough. We’re not making enough progress. I think he’s trying to push us…’

Sirius stares, aghast in part because there might be a grain of truth in it. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Sirius, he was always a radical,' Peter's so exasperated that he gets up from the table and starts pacing. Sirius, conversely, feels that he couldn’t move if he wanted to. 'Remus has always been the one pushing us, always the one advocating for positions that are beyond where we are...'

'He’s kept us honest,' Sirius tries. He's close to tears. 'He’s made me pay attention to things that aren't obvious, about who to watch out for, how to question my own assumptions...'

'Sirius!' Peter rounds on him. 'Jesus Christ, Sirius, do you hear yourself? Making excuses for him?'

Sirius makes a noise, shrugs, shakes his head.

'Sirius, I understand,' Peter steps close and leans over the table, 'how you feel about Remus, ok?' He drops his voice. 'But don't you think the time for schoolboy feelings is over?'

Sirius blinks.

'I don't care that you're gay,' Peter continues. 'But Remus isn't.'

Sirius blinks again. It's all he can do.

'I know what happened at the safe house, he told me everything,' Peter says, still in that quiet voice, but now it's kind, and pleading. 'He said it was a mistake.'

Sirius has heard that hearts can break, but he'd never known they could disintegrate. He wants to lie down on the floor and die. Peter must see it in his face, because he says, 'Fuck, Sirius, I'm sorry.'

Sirius shakes his head. 'Whatever you think is best,' he says, somehow, as if there’s a reason for him to go on. ‘If we have to – should we speak with him –‘

‘When he comes back from Wales,’ Peter says, grim.

 

***

The chance never comes. While they’re arguing in the pub, Voldemort and his goons come to James and Lily’s new safe house. James and Lily, unarmed, send a panic signal to the Order, but they are gunned down before help arrives.

Harry is orphaned.

Over the chaotic next few hours, Sirius learns that Voldemort himself fired the shot that kills each of them; that he lingered over killing Lily and his brazenness gave the Order time to arrive, and to see that he was arrested for their murder. A few remaining rebels in the government ensure that Voldemort cannot seek refuge abroad. Sirius hears from Hagrid, another Order member, that Voldemort fled to Heathrow and Dumbledore confronted him there; that Voldemort is on his way to prison already; that Harry will be taken to a distant aunt and uncle and raised.

It takes several hours for Sirius to realise that Peter is gone. Another Order member, Frank, had retrieved them from the pub and Sirius had run all the way back to the house and fought his way past police tape to see it for himself. They’d already taken James and Lily away; Harry was being watched by a policewoman who lets him hold the baby when he’s the only thing that makes him stop crying. A few minutes later, they whisk Harry off to his new family, and Sirius, now utterly alone, remains.

In fact, it takes several hours for Sirius’s brain to connect: Peter was at the new safe house. Remus had no knowledge of it. No one else from the Order had any of knowledge of it – they’d had to hear its location as a codeword when James sent the panic signal. Only three people who were still alive had known its location: Sirius. Dumbledore.

And Peter.

Sirius, standing alone in a cold rain outside the line of the police tape, feels rather than knows that Peter is the Judas. It comes as a chill that runs down his spine and turns his body and mind to ice. He walks to the kerb, straddles his motorcycle, and drives to Peter’s house. No one is home, but the place looks ransacked. Sirius stalks back to his motorcycle, straddles it again, and thinks. Where earlier he’d been frantic, now he is all logic.

 _Where would Peter flee? How would he do it_?

Six hours later, as the weak sun breaks through cloud to fully cap the brown Victorian buildings of an anonymous Midlands High Street, Sirius finds him. The slanting light is blazing in his eyes. Peter has a bomb that Sirius doesn’t know about until it is too late. The last thing he hears for a time is Peter screaming, ‘James and Lily, Sirius, how could you?’

He wakes in the street, where he is being handcuffed as paramedics lift him onto a waiting stretcher. He can feel sticky bloody at his ears and hear sirens and, underneath them, a strange quiet that he takes to be the silence of death.

‘Where’s Peter?’ he slurs at the nearest paramedic, his ears ringing almost too loudly to hear himself.

The paramedic says, very shortly, ‘Dead.’

 

***

Prison is –

Well, it is an immensity of things. But what it is most of all, after careful deliberation – and fuck, but he has a tremendous amount of time for careful deliberation – is clarifying.

He distils himself down into the essence of Sirius. He becomes a hardened diamond of purpose, of work ethic, of desire for justice. Peter is dead, but he is still here, innocent. He reads constantly, incessantly, counting the hours by the pages he turns, only allowed fiction made before roughly 1950. No one will give him tools to write, so he teaches himself to etch words into his mind, memorising full passages. He becomes other people, characters in novels, and exists inside of them for days and weeks on end before some event will abruptly bring him back to himself and the world he inhabits now.

There is no trial and almost no access to official recourse. He is assigned a single case worker, a punctilious man named Cornelius Fudge who can barely hide his contempt. He sees him once a year, to be formally denied any further assistance. Other than that, he is kept largely solitary, never allowed to interact with other prisoners. He knows he is constantly watched by a network of cameras but has no idea if this is unusual for a prisoner or who might be observing him. The guards loathe him but keep their distance, and they never physically abuse him, almost as if they are on orders not to – Lord knows he tries out of sheer boredom to bait them many times, almost hoping for a blow to the head from one of their long sticks. The only punishment is solitary confinement.

He thinks at first that he will crack, but the fact of his innocence is enough, and he clutches it to himself. He waits, without hope, for the end, but he won’t end it himself. Death seems like it would be an admission of a guilt that he refuses to feel.

 

***

Twelve years pass.

All he knows of the outside world is what he knew coming into this place – until:

Fudge cuts a ridiculous figure, as always. Sirius loathes him. In the small room where they meet there are of course no windows, only a long table and two chairs, one on either side of it. Sirius is slumped in his when Fudge enters and makes no effort to sit up. These meetings happen once a year and after twelve years he knows exactly what will occur.

‘Looking a bit grey around the temples,’ Sirius suggests.

Fudge tuts and sits, fussily arranging his suit. ‘Now as you know, I’m here on official business.’

‘This isn’t a social call?’ Sirius asks. ‘I’m gutted.’

Fudge pulls a stack of papers out of his leather case. Sirius wonders why he bothers. ‘Your case has been reviewed,’ he says, shuffling the papers. He places some of them, along with a copy of the Telegraph that is in the centre of the pile, off to the side. Sirius can’t imagine why it would take so many papers to deny him his freedom. ‘And we have decided to continue your interment for the best interest of the public.’

Sirius feigns surprise. ‘What about my best interests?’

Fudge sighs deeply. ‘Mr Black…’

‘I would like a trial.’

‘You always say that.’

‘And yet I have not received one.’

‘Your actions speak clearly enough.’

‘For James and Lily,’ Sirius says calmly, as he always does. ‘I want a trial. Let their killer be brought to justice.’

‘We know who their killer is.’ Fudge leans forward. ‘It’s you.’

‘Prove it in court then,’ Sirius says. ‘If you know.’

‘And waste the taxpayer’s money on dredging up an ancient crime?’ Fudge looks annoyed, and then surprised. Sirius is confused as Fudge draws a small plastic square out of his pocket, touches it, and then holds it to his face. ‘Yes?’ he asks. ‘Can this wait?’

Sirius sits forward, staring intently at the device. A voice is coming out of it – it’s a telephone. A tiny telephone, untethered from a cord. Fudge notices him looking, frowns, and then rises and steps out of the room.

Sirius sits perfectly still for a moment, trying to process this sudden chance. Then he leans forward and slides the copy of the Telegraph out from the pile. He has never been allowed to see the news, not once in all these years. He flips through it as quickly as he can, knowing that he is almost certainly being watched, and that he will be stopped very shortly, but suddenly desperate to know anything of the world he’d been violently separated from twelve years ago.

And then he sees the headline: ‘MP Peter Pettigrew Calls for Reform of Immigration System.’

His heart seems to stutter in his chest. He stares at the words, and at the name, and then realises that the cameras will be recording all of this and that he must act normally. His hands are shaking as he puts the paper casually back onto the stack of papers and folders. He's terrified Fudge will return before he can get it but he knows he must act carefully or else the cameras will notice something strange. He waits as long as he can - ten seconds, maybe - and then leans forward again and casually knocks the stack to the floor. He curses loudly, bends down, and starts to collect them, making as much noise as he can to mask tearing the page from the paper and sliding it into his shirt. Then he piles all the papers up on the desk again. And then, because he knows it will appear in character, he starts rifling through them. Fudge returns seconds later, looking harried and out of breath, that absurd bowler hat he never removes slightly askew.

'Terribly sorry about that,' he says, as always the picture of a particularly British kind of fuck-you-politeness. 'Where were we?'

Sirius doesn't trust himself to speak, so he just shakes his head and shrugs.

'Just finishing, I think,' Fudge says, and he stands again, taking the stack of papers and putting them back into his case.

'Could I have that paper?' Sirius blurts, wishing instantly that he had not.

'What?'

Perhaps he can test the water, perhaps they will give him news… 'The Telegraph.'

Fudge looks scandalised. 'Certainly not.'

'I used to enjoy the crossword,' Sirius tries.

'Perhaps we can get you a book of them, then,' Fudge says, in a kindly voice that Sirius can imagine patronising the natives of some small British protectorate. Then Fudge leaves. The guards enter and unhook the chain from Sirius's shackled feet to the desk, then lead him by it down the corridor like a particularly dangerous stray dog. Sirius has never once in all these years committed violence in the prison, but they still treat him this way. It occurs to him, for the first time, that perhaps this, too, is them acting on someone’s orders.

In his cell, he somehow manages to wait until they shut off the lights and then carefully extracts the page from his shirt. He hides it underneath his mattress, face down, so that in the morning when the lights return he will be able to read it through the broad wire mesh that forms the underside of the bed.

All night, he lies awake in the cold darkness, his brain whirring through possible scenarios. The most likely is that this is not the same Peter Pettigrew. He convinces himself of that very quickly, or at least tells himself that he is convinced, but something nags at him - just a feeling, a feeling that this is the real Peter, the Peter he thought he knew.

James and Lily's murderer.

In the morning, the lights come on again, and he rolls out of the bed and begins his morning routine - pushups, situps, various other strength tasks. Routine is crucial in prison, and today is the first time in years that he breaks it. He finishes the pushups and then rolls over onto his back to do situps, except this time, he tries to improvise a new exercise. He lies back and pushes most of his body under the bed, then puts his legs up and lowers then slowly. He knows that the guards will be checking on him by camera, knows that they will come find him if his routine seems strange.

Underneath the bed, he can see the piece of newspaper, and read it fairly well.

'Today in the House of Commons, UK First MP Peter Pettigrew called for reform of the methods in which foreign visa holders receive benefits.'

Sirius scans through the article, looking for any hint that this is indeed the same Peter. The speech seems boilerplate UK First, with some confusing words included - technology, Sirius surmises, that he is not familiar with. It seems like they wish to implant something called 'RFID chips' into foreign workers in order to track their movements and ensure that they are not receiving subsidised health care? In frustration, he arrives at the bottom of the page, but not the end of the article, which is continued elsewhere. His legs are burning. He tugs the newsprint page out from under the mattress and flips it over, and there, on the back, is a photograph.

It is, unmistakably, Peter.

Older, and missing one hand, but - Peter. The caption says 'UK First MP for Bury South, Peter Pettgirew is a decorated war hero and outspoken advocate for immigration reform.' Sirius shuts his eyes for a second, then tears up the paper and eats it, systematically, coldly. The irony – that he is literally ingesting the truth so that others may not see it – is not lost on him. He slides out from under the bed to find one of the guards staring in at him.

'That's a new routine,' the guard says. His name is Yaxley.

Sirius nods. He's still trying to swallow the last of the dry newsprint.

'I think solitary confinement until we see if it’s going to stick,' Yaxley continues and he grins maliciously.

Sirius is led away and put into the solitary cell. He knows he has to work harder to keep count of time here, and is terrified that with the preoccupation swirling through his mind, he will not.

Peter is alive. Peter is an MP. Peter is a 'decorated war hero', presumably for turning spy and delivering to Voldemort some of the most prominent members of the Resistance... for murdering Lily and James... His mind keeps circling back to that. What if he's been kept in the dark about the news for twelve years because they know that he knows it is a lie? The only thing that has kept him sane has been that diamond of his innocence and this changes nothing about it, only hardens it further.

 

***

They let him out of solitary five days later. He feels that he is no longer human. The transformation has been a long time coming, but now, it is complete. He feels like Padfoot, the dog with the bone, notorious always for never letting anything go. Peter used to take the piss regularly for that, calling him a girl for remembering slights from weeks or even months ago.

 

Now he'll be the black dog that harries Peter.

James and Lily are dead and it seems the ideas they all - them, and him, and Remus - fought against are, if not ascendant, swinging forward. Sirius stands in his regular cell and breathes deeply. He has emerged once again from the concrete belly of the prison into the open air of its upper hallways and he is intact, with a deep stillness inside of himself. For years his deepest fear had been losing himself, going insane, not being capable of rational thought. He'd believed that that was the key to his freedom. Now he understands that he had to move through that fear and become something more than himself to truly be free.

He has become nothing but vengeance.

He understands now that his only remaining purpose is to seek justice. And the only way to do that is to escape.

Yaxley and the other cadre of elite guards in his particular unit, perhaps sensing a change in his demeanour, resort to solitary confinement and other punishments with greater frequency. They start fucking with his rations. Not having enough calories is a real problem for his plan, which requires physical endurance. He caches as much food as he can underneath his bed after every meal so he has ready energy for the journey.

Then the night comes – the new moon, darkness over the landscape, a fact he has calculated based on how many days he has been imprisoned, because he has not seen the sky in twelve years – and he does it.

The final step is to emerge from the tunnel he’s made his way into and out into the water. It is shockingly cold, and he is running out of oxygen. He swims as far as he can forward in the black sea and then emerges, gasping, into the choppy surf. He can see silhouetted the abandoned lighthouse in the distance, its light long ago extinguished at threat of outside invasion, and he sets to swimming towards it. Waves submerge him periodically, and as he gets closer to shore he has to deal with the current. He is on his last strength, having stuffed some bread into his mouth before he dove into the tunnel, but he will not give up.

And then the waves finally stop fighting him, and instead push him onward to shore. He lets the water shove him up the beach and then filter away, leaving sand in his clothing and hair. He rolls onto his back and is nearly inundated in the next wave. He drags himself further up the beach, digging his hands into the sand and crawling until he's fully out of the water. There's a brutally cold wind and his teeth are chattering uncontrollably. He crawls further, knowing that he has to make it into the trees or else he'll be perilously exposed. He staggers up the surprisingly steep bank and collapses into a tangle of hedges. Thorns tear his skin and clothing but he has no strength left; he sinks deeply into the nest of foliage and breathes in its sharp scent. Above his head, the night sky reels, full of stars. He stares up at them, his breath coming in ragged gasps, tears streaming down his cheeks. He has no memory of beginning to cry.

He allows himself this indulgence of feeling for just a moment before he rolls and drags himself from the embrace of the branches. He escapes, and is back on the bank above the beach. He can see the prison, standing on its island out at sea, but there's no unusual movement yet. His ruse is working, he hopes, although he knows they monitor it in infrared and the heat he'd managed to generate for his dummy will disperse quickly.

He walks along the road to the nearest town and breaks into a house that thankfully has men's clothing inside of it. He sheds the prison clothing and takes it with him, intending to dispose of it somewhere that will confuse people - he's thinking the train station - and leaves wearing as much black as he can, a hooded jacket, and a thick balaclava over the lower part of his face.

He finds a map in the village and ascertains his location. Part of his training had been to memorise a map of Britain and he knows it very well. Vengeance remains the only thing filling the void of his soul. He makes his way south, to London.

By the time he arrives the next morning - having crawled into a lorry clearly bound for the capital in the night - the news has gone out that he has escaped. As he passes shops, he sees it playing on ubiquitous moving screens - inside of bus shelters, outside of shops, screens everywhere covered in bright, quickly changing images whose editing gives him a disorientated feeling. His face in the videos is gaunt and, to him, barely recognisable - he hasn't seen himself in a mirror in over a decade.

London is oddly clean. Its streets are still in their original alignment but they seem scoured of any individuality. There are soldiers with guns on most corners. He keeps his head down and stays in the flow of crowds. He has to walk to his destination as he has no money. He's so hungry he feels faint, so he ducks into a street market and steals food from open stalls. His first actual crime. It is remarkably easy. Back on the street, where the soldiers are, his heart beats like machine gun fire. He decides that he won't go back to prison. If they come for him, they won't be able to take him alive.

It takes him hours to reach Westminster, and he arrives in the early afternoon. He looks at it - the Houses of Parliament, gleaming and familiar, a half-remembered symbol of freedom and oppression - and scouts the best way to enter. Then he goes down below the nearest bridge and sits under it to wait for cover of darkness. He knows they have cameras everywhere - they had been moving towards that before he was imprisoned and the prison itself had been full of them - so he keeps his head down. The river smells fetid and fishy. Away from the sterile halls of the prison, London is a sensory assault.

Once night comes, he waits longer - until there is no reasonable chance of encountering Peter. He plans to wait in his office overnight for him to arrive in the morning, giving himself the element of surprise and the opportunity to scout the place. He should commit at least one of the murders he was imprisoned for - and although he has no weapons, he feels certain he can do it with his bare hands.

After Big Ben rings out one, he leaves the bridge and walks rapidly towards the place where he thinks he can enter Westminster Hall. Adrenaline surges through him and leaves a harsh taste in his mouth.

Suddenly, a hand grabs his arm as a half-remembered voice hisses his name. 'Sirius!'

He swings out, but whomever it is anticipates his move and is much stronger than he. Sirius gets dragged bodily down the street. The hand around his arm might as well be steel programmed to never let go.

'What are you - Who are -' His voice is rusty and broken from little use.

'Remus,' the other man snaps. He spins and then stops, very abruptly, consulting a small box just like the one Fudge had that he holds in his free hand. He is wearing a hat low over his eyes but yes, Sirius sees it now, it is Remus. Unbidden, his heart thrills.

A second later, a car pulls up and Remus shoves Sirius into it, then follows him in, one hand coming up to jerk Sirius's hood down over his eyes.

'Are you Remus?' the driver asks.

'Yes.'

'And you're going to Angel?'

'Yes, please, and quickly.'

'That's far,' the driver says, but he puts the car into gear and pulls away from the kerb.

Sirius finds that he is shaking. Remus's hand is still clenched around his arm. Sirius opens his mouth and Remus - somehow knowing what he's about to do even through the balaclava, hisses, 'We'll talk at home.'

'Yes,' Sirius agrees, faintly. He doesn't know if Remus is friend or foe. Remus stares out the window of the taxi. Sirius is suddenly, vividly twenty-two years old again and has no idea what the man beside him is thinking. He wonders where he is being taken. Remus's hand is still on his arm, as if he thinks Sirius might bolt and jump out the door of the car. To be fair, he's considering it, as they get further and further from Peter.

'Trust me,' Remus says, very low, so that Sirius for a second thinks he might have imagined it under the bass of the driver's music. He looks at him and catches his face reflected in the glass. Remus's eyes are intense, staring directly at his.

Against his best judgment, Sirius does.

The car stops some indeterminate amount of time later – Sirius is having trouble keeping track of time now, in this world full of stimuli. Remus reaches for the door handle and there’s a quiet ‘snick’ as the driver locks it. Sirius has never seen an electronic door lock before and grabs for his handle in panic.

‘Listen,’ the driver says, ‘this is kind of weird circumstances.’

‘Is it?’ Remus asks, very pleasant. Sirius can see how tense he is. His own heart is beating wildly.

‘I mean, why would two men be going home together?’ the driver asks.

Sirius sees Remus relax. ‘What’s your payment app?’ he asks, and then rattles off several nonsense-sounding words in what is clearly a list. The driver also relaxes, and responds by repeating one of the words. He and Remus touch their identical black boxes to each other and then with another ‘snick’ the doors unlock and Remus finally releases his grip on Sirius’s arm and exits the car. Sirius opens his door cautiously and follows Remus, not understanding at all what has just transpired.

They walk around the block and into a narrow mews lined with garages and doors. Remus touches his black box to the wall at a seemingly random point and the door next to them springs open. Remus puts a hand on Sirius’s back and says, ‘Go inside,’ very quietly. ‘Hurry.’

Sirius steps into the darkened doorway and goes up a flight of narrow stairs and into an open room lined with windows – all shades drawn – that has a kitchen on one side and a lounge on the other. Another flight of stairs in the centre of the room leads upward, presumably to the toilet and bedroom. He hears Remus at the door behind him, throwing the bolt, and on impulse he looks around the kitchen, locates a knife in the drying rack, and grabs it, putting it behind his back as he hears Remus coming up the stairs.

‘Listen-‘ Sirius starts, but Remus shakes his head and jerks his hand towards the second set of stairs. Sirius blinks at him, and Remus turns away, takes the black box in his hand, and shoves it underneath the cushions of his sofa. Then he looks at Sirius again, makes an exaggerated ‘move’ motion with his hand, and walks up the stairs. Sirius, completely baffled, follows him. Remus enters a small room where the bath is and gestures to Sirius to follow him. Once he’s inside, Remus shuts the door, hesitates, locks it, and then turns, pulls open the shower curtain, turns on the water, pulls the curtain shut, reaches behind Sirius and turns on the extractor fan, and finally looks fully at Sirius.

Sirius’s heart drinks in the sight of him. The scars on his face, the grey in his hair, the lines at the corners of his eyes and his mouth, the everything that makes him _Remus_. Sirius taught himself to forget this and now, to have him here, is arresting. A person, a person so beloved, and so close, close enough to touch…

‘What did you want to tell me?’ Remus asks.

Sirius takes a deep breath. He has to focus on the task or he’ll be lost. ‘I’m here to find Peter,’ he rasps. ‘And if you try to stop me, I don’t want to hurt you, but I will.’ He pulls the knife from behind his back and brandishes it.

‘Oh, Sirius,’ Remus says, and then he shuts his eyes for a long moment and when he opens them again they are wet. Sirius feels the knot inside of himself starting to come undone and clenches his fingers more tightly around the knife.

‘I mean it,’ he says, not convincing anyone in the room.

‘Sirius,’ Remus repeats, and he puts a shaking hand up to his eyes, takes a visible deep breath, and then says, ‘I believe you.’

‘What?’

‘I believe you. That you’ll do that.’ Remus scrubs his face with both hands and clearly makes an effort to calm down. ‘Sirius. God. You idiot. You should have run.’

Sirius stares at him, not having heard much beyond the first bit. ‘You believe me?’ he whispers.

‘Yes,’ Remus says. They look at each for a very long moment. Sirius feels like he might faint. Then Remus says, ‘Why now? What happened? Did it just take you this long to – to figure out how to break out?’

‘How did you know I’d be there?’ Sirius asks. ‘At Parliament, how did you…’

‘Once I heard you’d escaped, I knew you’d go after Peter,’ Remus says. ‘Peter knows it too, of course.’

‘Do you – are you speaking with Peter – are you-‘

‘It’s complicated.’

‘Tell me.’

‘You owe me some explanations first, I think,’ Remus says quietly. ‘I just saved your life.’

Defiance flares up in Sirius. ‘I made it that far.’

‘You weren’t going to make it any further.’

‘I have a knife.’

‘You look like you haven’t had a full meal in years. I don’t think you’re in a place to make physical threats.’

Sirius swallows. ‘Try me,’ he whispers. ‘I won’t go back to prison.’

Remus’s purses his lips together in a gesture that looks unmistakably like he’s trying not to cry. ‘I don’t want you to,’ he says quietly. ‘I know you didn’t – you didn’t do anything wrong.’

Sirius feels like the earth is shaking underneath his feet. ‘What?’

‘I know you’re innocent.’ Remus says. ‘I know Peter is the one responsible for James’ and Lily’s deaths.’

Sirius stares at him. His arm holding the knife is shaking. Every part of him is suddenly exhausted beyond words. He feels adrift in swift currents, as if Remus had taken the rope holding him to the dock and instead of unwinding it slowly for future use he’d produced a machete and sliced it clean in two.

‘Sirius, I think I know most of what happened that night,’ Remus says, his voice ragged. ‘I didn’t for a very long time. I always thought – I couldn’t understand your role in it. I thought I was being stupid, that I was letting my emotions get in the way of reason with you – but I’ve done a lot of research and a lot of investigating and I know, now, what happened. All except what you were thinking. Why you didn’t come to me and tell me about Peter…’

‘It was my job to fix it,’ Sirius says. His voice breaks but he pushes on. ‘It was my fault, and I had to fix it. I’m not innocent. I trusted Peter over you …’ He drops his arm and lets the knife fall to the floor with a clatter. ‘Remus, it _was_ my fault, and I’m here to atone for it.’

Remus scrubs his eyes with his hands. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he says, his voice breaking too. ‘Or if it is, it’s mine too. And you went to prison as an innocent man.’ He wipes his eyes again, clearly annoyed that he’s crying. ‘If you’re going to atone, I’m going to help you.’

Sirius’s adrenaline fully runs out and he slumps down the length of the door until he is seated and wraps his arms around his knees. ‘You believe me,’ he whispers. ‘Really? You promise?’

Remus leans heavily on the counter and gets awkwardly onto the floor, favouring his good leg. He puts a hand on Sirius’s knee. He hasn’t been touched in twelve years. It burns. Sirius stares at the hand and the hard knot inside of him reaches its terminal state. ‘I believe you,’ Remus says fervently. ‘I promise.’

‘I’ve been so alone,’ Sirius says, before he really does unravel. He crawls forward just as Remus comes to him, and they wind up collapsed against the side of the tub, Remus’s arms wrapped around him, his face in Remus’s neck, which is wet with tears, he’s not sure whose. He grabs onto Remus’s arms and pushes his face harder into him and howls with grief and pain and betrayal, with the brutal edge of regret, every emotion he’s not allowed himself to feel for twelve years. Remus holds him so tightly it should be suffocating, but the pressure calms him down enough to breathe through the torrent. At some point Remus shifts, just slightly, but tightens his hold with one arm as he shuts off the water in the tub with the other. What feels like years pass before Sirius can do anything but this, but when he finally removes his now soaked and sticky face from Remus’s neck, he looks up and sees that Remus has his head tilted back, his chest heaving, silent tears coating his face. Sirius puts a hand up and cups one of his cheeks, wiping away some of the tears with his thumb.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Remus whispers. His eyes are still shut. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

‘Don’t be.’

‘I should have tried harder to get you out. I should have exposed it, maybe to the press…’

Sirius can’t stop touching Remus’s face. He puts his forehead against his stubble and rubs it. Suddenly, the ancient nickname feels appropriate. ‘Moony, forgive me for believing you were the spy.’

Remus makes a noise somewhere between a sob and a laugh. ‘Of course, Padfoot. And will you forgive me for thinking the same?’

‘I already have,’ Sirius says. He puts his fingers on Remus’s face and looks fully at him. He wants to cling onto this moment of pure emotion, but he can feel the dark thoughts beneath it. This changes nothing about the task before him. ‘Why did you run the bath?’

Remus puts a hand up and touches Sirius’s cheek, then slides his hand over to hold Sirius’s where it is touching his face. ‘I wanted to make enough noise that no one could hear us if I came to shouting.’

‘Neighbours?’

‘Bugs.’

Sirius frowns. ‘Your flat is bugged?’

Remus sighs heavily and lets his hand drop. ‘Yes. Short answer, yes. Long answer, well, we should have that conversation soon.’ His other arm, now around Sirius’s shoulder, squeezes him close and then releases slightly; the loss of touch feels like new grief to Sirius, who involuntarily makes a little noise. Remus touches his head with his own. ‘Listen, I’m going to get a friend to come and – he can do something to take care of the bugs. He can make the place habitable again until the next time I go out.’ Remus smiles shakily at Sirius. ‘I caught them. Bugging the place. I’m fairly certain on Peter’s orders.’

‘You have a lot to tell me,’ Sirius whispers. ‘They didn’t – no one would let me have news. In prison. I couldn’t have papers or watch television. Any book I wanted had to be older than fifty years.’ He smiles. ‘I’ve read a lot of Victorian literature.’

‘Oh?’ Remus asks softly. ‘What’s your favourite?’

‘ _Bleak House_ is a real masterpiece. Though its version of trapped in a byzantine bureaucracy is rather more benign than my own.’

‘ _The Count of Monte Cristo_ seems like it might have been informative.’

Sirius laughs, startled, and realises that he’s laughing for the first time in twelve years. ‘Moony,’ he says, and shuts his eyes to stop himself from crying. ‘I’m a mess.’

‘Me too,’ Remus says softly. He squeezes his shoulder again. ‘Listen, here’s what I think we should do right now.’

‘Go on,’ Sirius manages, trying to bring himself back to the task at hand.

‘I’m going to text my friend to come over and kill the bugs. He’ll think it’s just routine – I get him to do it all the time. The bugs get replaced at least once a week as far as I can tell but at least this buys us a moment. So long as we stay in the house I think we’ll be all right. While I’m doing that, you go into the bedroom and keep the door shut and be as quiet as possible.’ Sirius’s stomach rumbles. ‘I’ll bring you something to eat,’ Remus adds, smiling. ‘Something bland, I guess.’

‘Yeah,’ Sirius says. ‘I’ve been on bread and milk and Vitamin C tablets for a while now.’

Remus makes a move to stand, so Sirius stands, reaches for his hand, and pulls him to his feet. Remus says, ‘I’m going to make a lot of noise going downstairs to cover you going up – the bedroom is at the top of the stairs, on the left, all right?’

Sirius nods. He seems to have been wiped blank of all emotions for the moment; all he is now is exhaustion, pure and dull. Remus opens the door and clatters down the stairs, leaving the extractor fan on, and Sirius goes the opposite way and finds the bedroom, closing the door as quietly as he can. The room is sparse, just a bed and a bedside table with a desk lamp and an enormous, architecturally-unsound tower of books that spills over it and meets another where it rises up from the floor beside it. Sirius smiles involuntarily at this display, which is exactly what he would have expected from Remus. A moment later, the door opens and Remus appears with a plate with bread, a knife, and a jar of honey.

‘Try that?’ he suggests, as Sirius grabs for the food, suddenly ravenous. ‘Arthur will be here soon, so be quiet, all right?’

Sirius nods, bread already halfway to his mouth. Remus leaves again and he stands, shovelling in food before trying to rein himself in – he has no desire to become ill. He puts the plate down on the floor and pushes it as far away from himself as he can, then sits down on the bed.

He finally notices the photograph:

 

Devil’s Bridge, Wales. 680 metres above seal level.

The first thing he sees is how uncomfortable they look. It is indeed the last photograph that they ever took together and now he imagines that they knew it. James is squinting away from the camera, Remus sitting squished into one corner of the bench opposite Sirius with his legs crossed, Peter not really smiling, and Sirius putting on a show, his coat open and his legs spread wide, pretending that everything is fine. Looking at the photograph, he truly can’t remember ever being that young. The man in it looks like he once did, but beyond that… He reaches out and pushes it face down so he can’t see it anymore. He doesn’t need the ghosts. There’s enough inside his head without having to contend with them outside of it.

The bed is the softest thing he’s felt in years. He tells himself that he’ll just lie down and see what it feels –

He wakes in the semi-darkness of dawn. He’s in such a warm, soft cocoon that he imagines for a moment that he’s a caterpillar, safe inside his chrysalis, not really planning to emerge today, thanks, because it’s just too nice inside here. Then he realises a few things in rapid succession:

First, he is not in His Majesty’s Prison.

Second, he is in a bed, curled on his side and wrapped in a warm duvet.

Third, he’s not wearing a prison uniform.

Fourth, Remus is sleeping beside him.

For just a second, he watches Remus sleeping. He’d believed, when he was younger, that this was the key to his happiness: a warm bed and this man in it. The twelve years between them feels like an almost impossible span to bridge. He suddenly feels sick, pushes himself out of bed, and runs down the hallway to the toilet.

When he emerges, he goes down the stairs into the kitchen/lounge area. He peeks around one edge of the heavy drapes and sees London, shrouded in fog, the landscape dotted by so many more tall buildings than it had been when he’d lived here before. There’s a cluster of skyscrapers, all gleaming glass and impersonal, not far from St Paul’s. Sirius feels an almost visceral mourning for the London of his youth, followed by a similar mourning for his youth itself. He’s old now; he’d seen himself in the mirror in the bath last night and had felt trapped inside this body. He sits down on the floor and puts his head in his hands. Eventually he lies down on his side on the hardwood, shuts his eyes, and falls back to sleep.

‘Sirius?’ A warm hand is on his shoulder, shaking him gently. ‘Why are you sleeping down here?’

Sirius rolls over and sits up, rubbing his eyes. He feels shaky and aches all over. ‘Sorry,’ he says quietly.

‘It’s perfectly all right,’ Remus says. ‘Nothing to apologise for. Tea?’

Sirius blinks at him. ‘Oh my god yes please.’

A few minutes later, he’s sitting on Remus’s sofa, holding a steaming mug in his hands and inhaling the scent of Remus’s Yorkshire Gold. ‘There’s still good in this world,’ he reminds himself aloud, as Remus joins him.

‘Oh yes,’ Remus agrees. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Better,’ Sirius says. ‘I think. For now.’ He laughs sardonically. ‘I’m not entirely – my emotions are a bit –‘

‘I can’t even imagine,’ Remus says.

Sirius remembers how kind Remus always was and considers having a cry again. Then he remembers his purpose in life and says, ‘So, how are we killing Peter?’

Remus sets his tea down, looking very sombre. ‘Yes, about that…’

Sirius goes cold. ‘What? You said you’d –‘

Remus holds up a hand. ‘I promise you, we are going to get justice for James and Lily. But murdering Peter in cold blood is absolutely not the way to go about it.’

Sirius slams his tea down on the table. ‘Remus, you said-‘

‘Listen,’ Remus says, so sharply that Sirius, for perhaps the first time in his life, really does. ‘Peter is a respected member of Parliament. A lot of things have changed in the last twelve years. If you haven’t seen the news…’ He frowns. ‘How did you know to go to Parliament? And why did you break out now?’

‘I saw a paper. Fudge – he’s my – my legal representation, I suppose,’ Sirius says, bitterly. ‘He comes by once a year to tell me they can’t possibly let me out.’

‘But you never had a trial,’ Remus says softly. Sirius nods, jaw clenched, and Remus says, ‘So, Fudge. Go on…’

‘He came by three months ago,’ Sirius says. ‘He makes it theatre, does a big show of taking out all these papers and files… well, this time, his papers and files included a copy of the Telegraph. He’s never made that mistake before. I’m – I wasn’t allowed any news at all.’ Remus makes a little noise, and when Sirius looks at him, he shakes his head and then nods encouragement.

‘So then he got – he has a little black box, just like yours. And he – well, what are those?’

Remus frowns. ‘Little black box?’

‘Yes, it’s like a telephone? But you were using it-‘

‘Oh!’ Remus nods. ‘Yes, it is a telephone. And a lot of other things.’

A thought occurs to Sirius. ‘You put it under the sofa cushions last night.’

‘Yeah.’

Sirius raises his eyebrows. ‘Well… why?’

Remus looks into the distance and sighs. ‘It’s a long story, of course. But one I guess I’d better tell.’ He pauses, frowning, then begins, ‘After you went to prison, a lot of things happened very quickly. Voldemort went to prison for James and Lily’s murder, and Peter convinced everyone – including me – that he’d acted heroically in getting you locked up for giving them up. He lost a hand in the explosion, which seemed terribly tragic. There was a real feeling that people might want to return to sanity, having purged the dictator. The King gave a rousing speech and we had free elections, no more Lord Protector. But meanwhile, without most people really knowing it, a lot of money was being funnelled into advancing technology. Some very clever and very wealthy people had seen that making the world fully connected by the internet would actually allow them to be able to control it – at least well enough that they could have their interests served.’

Sirius vaguely remembered the internet as a concept; computers speaking to other computers, all owned by the military or universities. ‘But how does a telephone…’

‘It’s all part of the same global network now,’ Remus says, sounding weary. ‘And it’s indispensable to modern life. Any business you transact goes through it – banking, buying a train ticket, paying for our car last night. And as a result, all of our movements can be tracked. Phones also have microphones and speakers and cameras – they can be accessed remotely and used for surveillance in both directions. That’s military technology that few people are discussing or willing to admit. That’s why I stuffed my phone into the sofa cushions last night. And it’s in a safe right now with lead walls so that it wasn’t harmed when my friend destroyed the rest of the electronics in the place last night and so it can’t hear us now. Of course someone will get suspicious that it’s hearing nothing, but hopefully they conclude I’m sleeping late…’

‘In prison, there’s cameras everywhere,’ Sirius says quietly. ‘They know everything. It’s why I kept my face covered after I escaped, I thought they’d be looking for me using station cameras – that I might be seen…’

‘Yes,’ Remus says, and there’s a kindly tone in his voice, as if he’s trying to break the news gently. ‘Here too. All of London’s public space is visible to cameras. Lots of private places as well, though that’s less known or admitted to. And, until last night, the inside of my home as well – and I’m certain the homes of many other politically suspicious people.’

‘Why are you politically suspicious?’ Sirius frowns at Remus. ‘Past activities?’

Remus nods. ‘That, certainly. Though Peter has been a powerful friend in keeping that off my record so I can be employed.’ He smiles rather bitterly. ‘He makes certain that I know it, too. But there’s some more damning things about me as well.’

‘Like what?’

‘I’m a lecturer in history at UCL,’ Remus says. ‘Being in academia is seen as very suspicious. After all, we might not buy the official state line of information. We might ask too many questions, do too much research, uncover too many truths.’ He sighs. ‘Our funding has been cut to nothing because of it. Why would people need to know anything about humanities or the social sciences when they’re in pursuit of well-paying jobs to create new technology? Why would knowing how to research or ask questions be important?’ He stops and bites his lip. ‘Sorry, I’m rather bitter about it.’

‘It’s all right,’ Sirius says. He remembers: ‘Anti-intellectualism was a major part of Voldemort’s rise. We used to talk about that.’

Remus nods. ‘Exactly. It’s a huge part of most fascist movements. Unfortunately, in our supposedly free and fair society today they’ve managed to re-brand it – now you’re welcome to study those things, but just know that you won’t have a career. There’s no funding in it. So why not do something worthwhile with your life, that’s the official line.’ He takes a sip of tea. ‘Anyway. It’s not just that I’m an academic.’ He pauses, then shrugs, and says without looking at Sirius, ‘And I’m gay.’

Sirius hasn't thought about his own sexuality in years – he thought he’d murdered that part of himself, along with most of the others, in his quest to become nothing but purpose. And being mainly in solitary confinement, never kept with other prisoners, and seemingly with some special orders to his guards, he’d never encountered the violent expressions of sexuality that many prisoners did.

And yet, Remus's words stir something.

'Is that illegal now?' he asks.

'Yes.' Remus shrugs. 'More or less.'

'All of it?'

'Essentially. Not the act - not yet - but in this surveillance state, anything you do to meet someone... it'll come back to you haunt you.' He finally looks at Sirius. ‘Remember the driver last night? Asking about us going home together? He was asking for a bribe for silence, which I happily paid. I assume if I’d put up a fuss, he would have posted a video on the internet, maybe shared it with my university.’

'We had that right,' Sirius says, anger burning his throat. 'We at least had that. They legalised it years before I even...' He looks away, towards the drawn shades. 'They can take it away from us again?'

'Yes,' Remus says, simply. When Sirius doesn't answer, Remus touches his arm, so, so lightly, just a ghost of a touch that makes Sirius ache. Remus says, 'We had a lot of rights we fought for, and thought we'd have forever because we fought so hard,' he says, and his voice is gentle, like an apology. 'But they're gone now.'

Sirius sits for a moment, and then realises something. ‘I didn’t know you were gay.’ Remus’s mouth does something complicated; Sirius can tell he’s trying not to say something snarky. ‘I mean,’ Sirius says, suddenly blushing, and there’s a strange feeling, this visceral embarrassment that he’d forgotten all about. ‘There was that one time. But I didn’t know it was – it was for all time.’

‘Well…’ Remus leaves the word hanging, then purses his lips. 'I should have fled,' he says grimly. 'France, Germany, Scandinavia... they're all safe havens. For now.'

'So why didn't you?'

Remus hesitates. 'You.'

Sirius is startled. ‘Me?’

‘I had an opportunity to leave,’ Remus says. ‘A conference in Stockholm six months ago. I could have asked for asylum, and I think I would have been granted it. I was all packed, I’d brought everything I needed.’ He looks down at his hands and Sirius takes the opportunity to marvel at the way that Remus speaks – has always spoken – the words coming out from him in perfectly formed thoughts, laid down like an analytical argument. ‘But you see, the night before, Peter and I talked on the phone for, I don’t know, an hour or so – longer than we had in ages. He knew I was going to the conference and I think he had a suspicion that I might seek asylum. We had rather a strange conversation.’

‘Wait,’ Sirius interrupts, anger suddenly rising up in him. ‘You know Peter is guilty but you just –‘

Remus holds up a hand. ‘Let me explain,’ he says. He pauses, and Sirius can see him putting his thoughts in order. ‘I didn’t know about Peter’s guilt until after this conversation. And yes, he was already a UK First MP, but it’s been a gradual movement towards that. We’ve been growing apart for years, but you have to understand – after James and Lily, after you were sent to prison – he’s all I had left.’

Sirius hates to admit the truth of it. ‘Sounds a bit shit,’ he mutters, and Remus laughs.

‘I mean, at first it was all right. He was seriously injured in the bombing. He lost a hand, you know. I helped him get back on his feet, and run his campaign for election, when he was just a member of the Labour Party. And he seemed genuinely supportive of my PhD research.’

‘What was your research about?’

Remus smiles sardonically. ‘Warning signs of an impending autocracy. With historical examples.’

‘Oh god,’ Sirius says. ‘Sounds depressing.’

‘It very much was,’ Remus agrees. ‘But I wanted to stop it happening again.’ He sighs. ‘Unfortunately, I didn’t really anticipate how technology would change democracy, how easily voters could be manipulated by the introduction of falsehoods from seemingly trustworthy sources…’ He trails off and then says, ‘Anyway, a few years ago, Peter’s politics shifted. There was a growing fervour for the kind of xenophobic sentiment that we’d seen before. There was an enormous financial crash that contributed to growing wealth inequality, and suddenly there was money to be had in exploiting that inequality, leveraging it for the wealthiest, forcing austerity on the rest. Politicians – Peter included – were heavily courted by a certain kind of oligarch with the intention of using anti-immigrant feeling to get people to vote against their own financial interests.’

‘Were the Blacks involved?’ Sirius asked quietly.

‘Sadly, yes,’ Remus says. ‘Your cousin Bellatrix and her husband went to prison after Voldemort did-‘

‘He’s still in prison?’

Remus’s face now looks very grim. ‘Not for long, I fear. There’s growing sentiment to bring him back. He had the right ideas, many people claim. But he’s still there. And then Bellatrix and her miserable husband went to prison for attacking Frank and Alice Longbottom, but otherwise-‘

‘Are they…Are Frank and Alice…?’

Remus shuts his eyes for a second and says, ‘They both wound up in a permanent vegetative state.’

‘Fuck,’ Sirius whispers.

‘Yes,’ Remus agrees. He reaches out and puts a hand on Sirius’s. Sirius realises that he’s been aching to be touched again and slides his fingers through Remus’s. ‘Recently,’ Remus continues, ‘I’ve been working on a project with some colleagues about reconciliation. How certain countries go through that, after a terrible event, and certain others don’t – what works, what doesn’t. Germany after World War II, South Africa after apartheid –‘

‘Apartheid is over?’

Remus grins. ‘Yes. God. I feel like I need to give you a primer on twelve years of world events.’

Sirius groans. ‘Me too.’

‘You’ll catch up,’ Remus says, squeezing his hand. And then, unexpectedly, he adds, ‘You’re the cleverest person I’ve ever met.’

‘Says the man who is a professor,’ Sirius says, blushing.

‘That you could come out of that prison and be this coherent…’ Remus says softly. ‘Anyway, we never had a reckoning here. We simply locked Voldemort away, and Bellatrix and whatever her husband’s name was, and a few others, and that was that.’

‘Me,’ Sirius says.

‘Yes, you, though aside from Voldemort, everyone else got a trial. And I’ve been advocating for trials for the two of you – that’s part of the project. Speak the crimes, put them into an official record, so they are not forgotten, so their meaning can’t be twisted into heroism.’ Remus sighs. ‘Of course, now I learn that there’s a reason you never had a trial…’

‘Your conversation with Peter,’ Sirius prompts.

‘Right,’ Remus says. ‘God, there’s so much to talk about.’ He gently disentangles their hands, then stands and gathers the kettle and mugs. ‘Toast?’

‘Yes please,’ Sirius says. He stands too, and fills the kettle, wanting to be useful, then leans back against the counter.

Remus opens the refrigerator and rummages through it. ‘So Peter and I spoke to each other with some frequency, but when he joined the revived UK First party it was, well, it was really damaging to our friendship. They’re anti-gay, anti-intellectual, and anti-disabled rights – so there’s me, in a nutshell. But we still had our old memories and ties, and so we had this complex relationship. I felt that he was my oldest friend – that I owed him something for that. And I think he feels the same for me. So he called me that night.

‘He seemed – I don’t know, a bit guilty. It’s hard to describe. I think he likes the power and the money but doesn’t really believe in what he says. I have to think that giving up the location of James and Lily eats at him. It felt like, well, like he wanted me to absolve him of crimes he wasn’t admitting to me. And then, as part of this conversation, he mentioned you. He said that he always personally checked on you and made sure that you were well. I asked him why he would care, since you’d been responsible for the murder of our best friend and his wife. And he just – he just didn’t have a good answer. And then he mentioned something I’d never heard before – he mentioned that he’d known where James and Lily were that night. Just in passing, he mentioned Godric’s Hollow. I hadn’t known where they were going despite saying goodbye in the morning and I’d always believed that only you had known.’ Remus hunches forward now, an intense look on his face. ‘So I was on the plane and I couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation.’ He looks up at Sirius. ‘Right? He wasn’t supposed to know?’

Sirius has gone over this story a million times in his head, if not more, but this point never fails to plunge him into the blackest despair. He says, ‘He wasn’t supposed to know. I told him.’

Remus doesn’t gasp, or yell, or do any of the things that Sirius would have expected him to. He just asks, ‘Why?’

‘Dumbledore asked me to drive them,’ Sirius says, voice dull. ‘But after he left, I felt it was too dangerous to do alone. There were fifteen checkpoints on the way, and the car we were using just didn’t seem safe without someone sitting on the passenger seat to keep the hollow floor from rattling. I rang Peter and he said of course, he’d be there in a few.’

Remus nods and hands Sirius a plate. ‘You wanted to do the right thing,’ he says, very gently.

‘I should have known it was Peter,’ Sirius whispers.

‘But you thought it was me?’

Sirius hesitates. ‘I didn’t – I didn’t know. Peter tried to convince me it was you.’

‘Yeah,’ Remus says, ‘well, he obviously did convince me it was you, but he’d started trying to get me to believe that for months before – before everything happened.’ Remus looks up and smiles without humour. ‘It’s a testament to my own poor mental state at the time that I believed any of it.’ He hands Sirius toast and leads him to the small table in the corner, where he pours more tea and wraps his hands around his mug. ‘So I thought and thought about what he said, and things just started to not add up. I started digging through any records I could think of and access. I found some old security camera footage of the bombing and it suddenly became clear that Peter did the damage to his hand himself.’ Remus sighs and looks down into his mug. ‘I was able to access that because I was using a public computer in Sweden. I knew I had to look somewhere dark to find it – in fact, I had to work quite hard to hack into records to get it. I’m shocked it existed, frankly. Peter might not know it does, or he may have found out that I looked at it. After I returned from Stockholm is when I really noticed that I was being watched, and I don’t think anyone could have accessed it without immediately setting off alarms... I took as many precautions as I could, but it’s always risky…’ He pauses, eyes focused elsewhere, and then seems to collect himself. ‘After I saw that footage, well, it was the allegory of the cave and I’d just walked outside. I realised that I’d been seeing everything about that night and the days leading up to it wrong. And from there it was quite easy – intellectually, if not emotionally – to conclude that you must have been wrongfully imprisoned.’ Sirius, until now riveted by the tale, feels a jolt in his stomach at this. ‘It was,’ Remus pauses, clearly searching for words. ‘It was not a good realisation.’ He makes a face. ‘Sorry. Understatement. I was devastated. Immediately, the next thing I did was try to look at your prison records. I found some very strange things there. Reports that indicated that your case was being consistently blocked by a single person, who I’ve surmised to be Peter.’

Sirius wants to cry. ‘Remus…’

‘It was hard work,’ Remus says. ‘A big clue was how well hidden all this was – not what an honest situation would have been. And so I was left to conclude that you must be innocent. And ever since, I’ve been trying to gather evidence, to build a legal case that Peter should be the one in prison and not you.’

Sirius does start crying now, mortified that he’s sniffling over his tea and toast, having to put one shaking hand over his eyes. Remus reaches out and takes his other hand, squeezing it hard. ‘I’m sorry,’ Sirius manages. ‘Sorry for crying.’

‘Don’t be,’ Remus says, sounding angry. Sirius looks up at him, and there’s a truly frightening look on his face. ‘Never be sorry for that,’ Remus says fiercely. ‘I fucked up. I never ever should have listened to Peter. I never should have believed him…’

‘He blew up his own hand,’ Sirius says, managing a watery smile. ‘That’s – he was believable. He convinced me we should have a conversation with you about it when you returned from Wales. I guess he wasn’t sure at the time if Voldemort would be able to… if he’d make it to James and Lily…’ He takes several deep breaths, trying to calm himself. Remus is clenching his hand so hard that it’s painful. ‘Is Harry ok?’

‘Yes,’ Remus says. ‘They’ve sent him to our school, by the way. I talked to McGonagall – she’s still Head of House – and she says he’s doing really well.’

Sirius nods, chewing his lip. ‘Good.’

‘I didn’t hear your story,’ Remus says gently. ‘We ended it with you being visited by Fudge.’

‘Oh,’ Sirius says. His mind is nowhere near as well-ordered as Remus’s and he’s not sure how to tell it. He chews his lip, thinking. ‘Well, he had these papers – see, he left the room because someone rang him on that – on the little telephone.’

‘They’re called mobiles,’ Remus says, smiling faintly.

‘Ah, ok.’ Sirius manages to smile back. ‘Brave new world.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘So, um, yes, he left, and he had this stack of papers – he always takes them out and makes a big show of saying that he’s done a lot of work for me but I’m to be denied any trial or release anyway. I told him he was pretty crap at his job a few years ago and he told me that on the contrary he’s very good at it. So I understand that now.’

‘Fuck,’ Remus says, viciously. ‘Fuck him.’

‘Yeah,’ Sirius says. He takes a deep breath. ‘Anyway. In his papers this time, there was a Telegraph. That never happened before. Ever. And I hadn’t seen a paper in so long, I barely knew what to do, but I knew that I wanted to see it. I managed to steal a page from it and I had to put it under my bed to read it and I had to wait all night to see it based on how they watched me… but the page had a story about Peter. He was saying something anti-immigrant, and it said he was a UK First MP. I thought for a while that it couldn’t possibly be him – Peter Pettigrew isn’t the most unusual name, you know – but there was a photograph. On the reverse.’

‘What luck,’ Remus whispers.

‘I know,’ Sirius says fervently. ‘It almost feels like fate. So then I knew I had to break out, and, it took me some time, but I figured it out.’ He squeezes Remus’s hand. ‘And you finding me feels like fate too…’

‘Once you’d broken out, I knew you’d go after him,’ Remus says. ‘You always were persistent and single-bloody-minded.’ He smiles and reaches out with his other hand, so that he’s clasping Sirius’s hand in both of his. ‘And I promise you,’ he says, very solemnly, ‘I will do everything I can to make this right.’

‘Thank you,’ Sirius says. He puts his other hand around Remus’s and they sit that way, at the kitchen table, hands clasped over it, in silence for several moments.

Then Remus says, ‘Listen,’ and Sirius can tell that he’s not going to like whatever he’s about to say, ‘and I know you don’t want to hear this, but I think the best option right now is probably to leave England.’

‘No, I certainly don’t want to hear that,’ Sirius says, startled. He pulls his hands back, even though the loss of touch feels like death. ‘I want Peter to pay for this.’

‘But,’ Remus says calmly, rationally, and Sirius thinks in a flash about punching him because he knows that tone, ‘getting the truth out is the most important thing.’ Sirius makes a dismissive noise even though he knows Remus is right and that he’s going to admit it in a moment. ‘Think of it this way,’ Remus says, leaning forward and reaching again for Sirius’s hands, which he gladly returns into his warm, strong hold. ‘Peter is incredibly well-protected. If you try to just kill him, chances are that nothing will come of it aside from you being captured again or killed.’

‘I won’t go back to prison,’ Sirius says savagely. ‘I’ll die.’

‘I know,’ Remus says, and there’s shades of emotions in the words, hundreds of them that Sirius can feel but not perceive. The sheer depth of them stills his anger. ‘But that doesn’t get justice. That doesn’t bring out the truth.’

‘What, you want a legal case?’ Sirius demands. ‘They’ll put me back in prison in the interim. They’ll doctor the evidence.’

‘I know,’ Remus says. ‘You’re absolutely right. But I do want a legal case. I want it in the papers, I want it proven before the people of this country. When James and Lily –‘ he swallows with an obvious effort. ‘It’s hard to describe. Their deaths galvanised people to reclaim their democracy. People were ecstatic. It was…’ Remus struggles for a second, then apparently settles on his metaphor. ‘We were all in a nightmare where we were plummeting to the ground, and suddenly we woke up, and we realised we weren’t trapped in the dream. We realised we had the choice to save ourselves.’ Remus puts his forehead onto their joined hands and Sirius can feel his breath, rapid and hot. Then Remus looks back up and says, emphatic ‘It is important to get the facts straight. To shine a light on the darkest secrets and let the rats,’ he grins, ‘ _rat_ scuttle out into the light.’

‘How can we get the facts?’ Sirius asks quietly. ‘Without me going back. Without any of the things I just said happening.’

‘I’m working on it,’ Remus says. ‘But in the interim, I want to take you somewhere safe.’

‘Like where?’ Sirius asks. ‘How?’

‘Wales is free,’ Remus says. ‘They broke away, along with Liverpool and the far west coast up through the Lake District. The M6 is a wall now – an electronic and physical one – down nearly to Stoke. Then it cuts west. It’s guarded by drones on both sides. But there are ways – ways to cross it.’

Sirius stares at him. ‘There’s a partition between Wales and England?’

Remus grins. ‘Wait until you hear what happened in Berlin.’

‘Wait, what? What happened in Berlin? Do you mean West or East?’

Remus starts laughing. ‘Oh, Sirius, we have to get you a video or something to catch you up. Surely someone makes videos for people who have been in a coma.’

‘Fuck off,’ Sirius says, like a reflex, like old times, and it feels amazing. ‘What happened to Berlin?’

‘I’ll tell you later,’ Remus says. ‘By the way, there’s no more Soviet Union.’

‘Are you lying to me?’ Sirius asks, aghast. ‘What has been happening?’

‘I promise, I’ll explain everything,’ Remus says. ‘If you let me take you out of England.’

‘To Wales?’

‘It’s the only way we’ll get you out. From there we can go on to somewhere else. In fact, we should. Wales won’t want to harbour you, but once we’re past the border, they won’t be monitoring us either. Part of their constitution is to not be a surveillance state.’

Sirius contemplates their joined hands and says, ‘Let me think about it. Can I think about it?’

Remus purses his lips. ‘Briefly,’ he says, ‘though we’ve talked nearly to noon and I suspect they’re going to trace you here sooner rather than later.’

‘How? Why?’

‘Well, first things first, aside from Peter, I’m the person you’re most likely to know…’

‘Right,’ Sirius says, cursing himself for stupidity. He feels a hollow in the pit of his stomach. All these years, he’s had one thing – his innocence. And the last few months: his desire for revenge? No, for justice. That’s all he’s had – it’s all he _is_. He can sense the edge of a great blackness in his mind, a place he doesn’t want to contemplate, that his consciousness is actively shying away from: who is he if not this? What do those twelve years _mean_ , if he’s something else?

‘Sirius,’ Remus says, very quietly, and Sirius realises that he’s been watching him. He knows he’s never been good at hiding his emotions – a vivid memory of trying to shield himself with a fur coat and sunglasses arises in his head – and that Remus must have seen a glimpse of his horror. ‘Sirius, I swear to you,’ Remus says, ‘I will do everything in my power to make this right.’

‘I believe you,’ Sirius says. ‘I’m just not sure that it can be made right.’ He forces himself to let go of Remus’s hands and stands. ‘Do I have time to clean up?’ he asks, suddenly longing for space and silence. ‘I’d like to take a shower.’

‘Yes,’ Remus says. ‘I need to make some travel arrangements. It will take me a few minutes.’ He stands and goes to an innocuous cabinet, opens it, shifts aside an unreasonably large quantity of Weetabix boxes, and reveals a safe. Opening it, he extracts a black box – the telephone. ‘Different one than my normal,’ Remus says in a clipped tone, shutting the safe again and twisting the dial. ‘I can use this one to contact people in a more discreet manner.’

‘Who are you contacting?’ Sirius asks, instantly panicked. What if this isn’t – what if Remus isn’t –

Remus gives him a curious look. ‘I need to get a car,’ he says. ‘I won’t say a word about why.’

Sirius takes several deep breaths. Of course. ‘Of course.’

Upstairs, he turns on the shower, strips off the stolen clothing, and steps inside, pulling the curtain shut protectively. He sits down on the floor and wraps his arms around his bony knees, hugging himself close under the scalding water. It feels amazing – he hasn’t had a warm shower since before prison – but inside he’s shivering with a kind of existential dread. He hasn’t planned for any of this. He escaped to kill Peter. Avenge James and Lily. Get justice. And now Remus is telling him this plan won’t work, that these three things are not all the same thing. And Remus was Peter’s friend for over a decade… but Remus believes him… and once he turns off this water – which he can choose to turn on and off, rather than the three minutes of cold water he’d gotten every morning in prison – he can get out of this shower and wrap himself in one of Remus’s plush towels and walk downstairs and Remus will be there.

Remus, his obsession that only the catastrophic break of prison could sublimate. Remus, whose hands are so warm and strong that the thought of leaving them makes him want to die.

What if Remus takes him to Wales and leaves him? Remus is a professor, he has a life here in London, and although the flat looks very much like there’s only one person living here, who knows what romantic obligations he has, a handsome and charismatic and clever man like that…

There’s a gentle knock on the door that almost gives Sirius a heart attack. He leaps up, looking wildly for a weapon, when the door opens and he hears Remus say, ‘I’ve brought you some clothes. I’m going to go get the car. I’ll be back in a few minutes.’

‘Thanks,’ Sirius manages.

‘By the way,’ Remus adds, and Sirius hears something in his voice that somehow manages to put him even more on alert, ‘I’ll knock three times when I return before I open the door. Otherwise, there’s a gun strapped to the inside of the cabinet underneath the kitchen sink.’

Sirius smiles in spite of himself. ‘Remus…’

‘Thank me when I’m back,’ Remus says grimly, and then he shuts the door. Sirius hears him stepping awkwardly down the stairs and leaving. He finishes showering and dresses quickly – Remus has left him a soft pair of corduroy trousers, a white shirt, and a warm jumper, so that he winds up looking rather like a professor – and goes downstairs. He finds the gun quickly because it’s enormous – a shotgun. The shells are taped to its barrel.

When Remus returns, he’s sitting at the table, the shotgun loaded and across his lap. Remus sees him and nods, once, then says, ‘Let’s take that.’

‘Where on earth did you get this?’ Sirius asks.

‘Black market,’ Remus says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Though it’s called the Dark Web now.’

‘Mild-mannered professor Remus Lupin,’ Sirius says, one eyebrow raised. If he’s honest, it’s a turn on. A second after that thought floats across his mind he realises that he hasn’t felt that way in twelve years.

‘Ready?’ Remus asks.

Sirius stands and nods, cracking open the gun and removing the shells, which he slips into his trouser pocket.

‘Oh, one more thing.’ Remus crosses the room to the kitchen counter and retrieves a massive knife from one of the drawers. Sirius doubts that it has anything to do with chopping vegetables, and stares as Remus walks to the sofa. He puts a hand on the cushions and slides down to the floor - it is obvious his leg is hurting him - then grips the side of the middle cushion with his free hand and slashes it open with the knife.

Inside are hundreds and hundreds of pounds.

Sirius stares. 'Jesus.'

Remus is so distracted, now pulling the money out and putting it into a bag on the floor, that he barely looks up. 'What?'

Sirius shakes his head, helpless at the situation. He says the first thing that comes to mind. 'There's so much.'

'Inflation,' Remus says shortly.

Sirius starts laughing, a little hysterically. Everything is happening very fast. Remus pulls out a small wallet, opens it, flips through a variety of fake ID cards, and chooses one, then pushes himself to his feet. ‘Sirius.’

Sirius shakes his head at him. ‘This is insane.’

Remus looks at him for a long moment. ‘Are you all right with this?’

‘I have to be, don’t I?’ Sirius asks. ‘I mean,’ he adds recklessly, ‘I could go try to murder Peter again…’

Remus gives him an unfathomable look. Sirius thinks there’s appraisal in there: what does Sirius have in him? What remains of who he was? Can he build it into something new, something better? ‘If we do it my way, you might have a future,’ Remus says. ‘Your way, all you have is a past.’

Sirius reaches out and takes the bag of money; it is as heavy as it looks. ‘I’ll carry this down to the car,’ he says. And then he hesitates. ‘Are _you_ sure?’

‘Yes,’ Remus says. ‘Never more so. Let’s go.’

Remus’s garage – into which he has pulled their getaway vehicle, a completely unassuming Ford Mondeo of a colour so generic that Sirius that can’t remember it if he looks away – is sparse, just a few bicycles in various states of disrepair and some old boxes. Remus looks at it – Sirius sees the look, and understands that Remus believes he won’t be seeing it again – and then Remus opens the boot.

‘Are you all right with going in here?’ he asks quietly. ‘I drove here alone, and we’ll be caught in an instant if it’s more than just me leaving.’

Sirius knows the drill; they’d used cars like this for moving James, Lily, and Harry. He swallows and helps Remus lift out the false boot, then he crawls inside and lies down. It is terrifying. Remus passes him a bottle of water and some food and says, ‘Are you sure?’

‘What choice do I have?’ Sirius asks.

Remus hands him a small light and, unexpectedly, a book: _Love Thy Neighbour_ , by Peter Maass. ‘Something to read,’ he suggests. ‘It was the most recent history book I had.’

Sirius reaches for Remus’s hand and squeezes it once, hard, before letting go and watching as Remus replaces the panel. He switches on the light and lies in the tiny compartment, opening the book.

Seventy-five occasionally bumpy pages of devastating Balkan history later, the car stops. Sirius instantly goes cold; this is much too soon to be the Welsh border. Where could they be? He remembers how soundproofed these damned panels are and closes the book and turns off the light, lying in the darkness. It’s just like being in solitary confinement again and he doesn’t have to exist here and now but instead he can reach out, be something else, in the vastness of space, free from the social necessities of seeming to be present…

He hears the door open, and then he hears the boot open, and jolts out of his meditative state. The panel lifts and he reaches for a weapon – the worst part of these panels is that you are always face first, and he knows people who were gunned down in the act of extricating themselves – but it is Remus.

‘Are you all right?’ Remus asks urgently. ‘We’ll be at the border in about an hour but there are a lot of checkpoints between here and there.’ He looks up and away, like a canine searching the landscape for a threat, his head still and eyes focused; then looks back and says, ‘This is the last safe place.’

Sirius gets up to take a piss behind a tree while Remus keeps watch. When he walks back, Remus is staring down at the motorway, which cuts through the verdant landscape, not a scar but a fresh wound from their vantage on this hill, clearly superimposed on an ancient place. Sirius, daring, puts a hand gently on the small of Remus’s back and Remus turns his head to look at him. Sirius finds that he doesn’t need to tell Remus to be careful, or to thank him; the words pass unsaid between them as Remus gives him a long look, his eyes searching his face, and Sirius lets himself look too. There’s a sudden tension there, but instead of urgency it feels like inevitability. The breeze is cold, bracing, and stings tears out of the corner of Sirius’s eyes.

He feels the edge of it - freedom. He can’t run down this hill, but maybe the next…

Remus touches his fingers gently to Sirius’s lips, a gesture that should be shockingly intimate but feels completely right, and says, ‘Let’s go.’

Driving again. There are stops this time. The boot opens each time. He hears Remus talking, a different accent, a different name, and then finally a very long stop, and each time he reaches inside of himself for that safe place and stays there until external movement brings him back.

This time they drive away very quickly, and there’s a series of strange, unidentifiable noises, and then the car stops very abruptly and when Remus removes the cover again they are in semi-darkness.

‘Where are we?’

‘Old tunnel,’ Remus says. He grips Sirius’s hand and tugs him out of the boot. ‘Railway or mine, not sure. Maybe both. But.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘We’re essentially there. No more cameras. I mean, let’s not be conspicuous, but I think we’re going to be fine. I just,’ he touches Sirius’s shoulder lightly, ‘I don’t want to leave you in there.’

In the passenger seat, Sirius has the money bag at his feet, crumpled and empty. ‘What…?’

‘Bribe to get into the tunnel,’ Remus says, and a second later they crest out of it and into a brilliant late winter sunset; they must be facing due west. Remus hands him a small pair of field binoculars. The landscape is mainly farms, but far in the distance on a bluff he can see a massive castle with steep walls jutting like a porcupine back with modern gun installations. It is surrounded by small flying devices, each traversing their own purposeful pattern.

‘Keep an eye on those,’ Remus murmurs. ‘If you see one of the drones coming our way, let me know. I swapped our plates to Welsh ones but they might know about the tunnel and surmise where we came from.’

‘I thought we were safe here?’

Remus hums. ‘I’m not sure safe is the right word.’

‘Go on…’

‘Think of Wales as being neutral, and the borderlands chaotic. The border is guarded by various castles like that one but they tend to be run by… let’s call them patriotic individuals rather than any centralised force. If we get caught by the wrong people, they might see a lot of money for turning any Englishman over to the border.’

Sirius exhales. ‘This is weird.’

‘We’re headed to Cardiff to meet some people,’ Remus says. ‘Cardiff will be safe.’

‘Safe’ isn’t the word Sirius would have chosen once they see the multitude of weaponry pointed towards Weston-super-Mare – Newport, similarly, has what appears to be a small nuclear missile exposed to air and pointed at a very low angle across the water towards Bristol – but Remus relaxes visibly as they turn off the M4 and head through grey-housed suburbs. Sirius notes that there are no signs in English; everything is Welsh. There’s a checkpoint just outside the city centre and Sirius’s heart nearly stops, but Remus says something in rapid Welsh to the man with the gun pointed at them and they are waved onward without so much as a look into the vehicle.

Remus pulls the car into a large, multi-story carpark in the middle of the city and turns it off. He exhales deeply and puts his forehead on the steering wheel. ‘Oh god,’ he mutters.

Sirius puts a hand on his back. ‘Thank you,’ he says fervently. ‘You’re a hell of a driver.’

Remus sits up and holds up his hands. They are shaking. ‘I feel like all my adrenaline just ran out.’ He reaches for the door handle. ‘Come on.’

‘Should I come with you?’

‘I’m certainly not leaving you.’

‘Aren’t I rather, uhm, wanted?’

‘Not here,’ Remus says. ‘The Welsh wouldn’t help the English with anything right now. Anyway, the way we’re going, we’ll only be seeing two people, and both of them know you’re innocent.’

‘What? More people know?’

‘Just them,’ Remus says. ‘I couldn’t keep it a secret. Imagine if I’d died - or been assassinated - and the information I’d found was lost... Come on, I’ll explain everything in their office.’

Sirius follows him out of the carpark and into a lift that deposits them in a hallway lined with closed doors, many decorated with cut out comics, newspaper articles, and stickers. Sirius follows him to the end of the hall, where Remus knocks on the last door and then opens it and ushers Sirius inside.

‘Remus!’ a big man stands up from behind his desk, his booming voice joyous. ‘You made it!’

‘We’ve been so nervous!’ says a pink-haired woman seated in front of the desk.

Remus hugs her tightly, and shakes the man’s hand. ‘It was touch and go,’ he says. ‘Sirius, this is Kingsley. He’s a law professor. And this is Tonks, his post-doc.’

Sirius shakes each of their hands in turn, struck by the absurdity of the situation – just three days ago he was sleeping in a prison cell, and now here he is, observing social niceties. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he says awkwardly.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Kingsley says, clasping his hand tightly, ‘for what’s happened. We are dedicated to getting justice for everyone involved.’

‘Thank you,’ Sirius says, startled by his sincerity.

Tonks’s face is serious. ‘We couldn’t believe it when Remus showed us the security footage,’ she says.

‘Once I uncovered what had happened, I had to share it with these two,’ Remus explains. ‘They’re my collaborators on the project about memory and reconciliation I was telling you about earlier.’

‘It’s just shocking,’ Tonks says. ‘So much of the truth has been wilfully obscured.’ She looks up at Remus. ‘How was your journey?’

Remus shrugs. ‘Dicey in places, but nothing too serious. We left London around one and I’ve been driving since.’

‘How did you get into Wales?’ Tonks asks, frowning.

‘There are ways,’ Remus says.

‘Oh right,’ Kingsley says, with a fond smile, ‘we always forget that Remus wasn’t always an academic.’

‘Turns out that’s come in rather handy in this brave new world,’ Remus points out. ‘If only I’d gotten a position here,’ he looks back at Sirius, ‘but then I wouldn’t have been able to grab you and get you to safety.’

‘Sit,’ Kingsley orders them. ‘I’ll make us tea.’

Tonks scoots her chair around and Sirius and Remus sit in the two others in front of Kingsley’s broad desk. Tonks has a strange thin device with a keyboard and screen that Sirius surmises is a portable computer. She leans forward and, with a few keystrokes, a map of Britain appears on the screen.

‘All right, Remus, show me where it is,’ she says, and he laughs and leans forward, indicating an area west of Gloucester.

‘There’s an old tunnel there,’ he says. ‘The entrances are quite obscured. You have to know where to look.’

Sirius suddenly can’t take the enclosed space and new people. He stands up. ‘Where’s the toilet?’

‘Just down the hall on the left,’ Tonks says.

Remus reaches out to him. ‘Are you all right?’

Sirius nods curtly and leaves, shutting the door and then standing outside in the hallway and breathing heavily. Inside, he hears Tonks say, ‘Was there like a _thing_ between you two?’ Whatever Remus replies, it makes her laugh. Sirius walks rapidly down the hall and pushes open the door to reveal a single stall. He locks the door behind himself and looks at himself in the mirror. He appears to be a thousand years old.

‘You can do this,’ he says aloud. This is much harder than just murdering Peter, this being around other people and talking and having emotions. He thinks of his friends: the four boys in the photograph. Who will he have ever been if he doesn’t do right by the ones that deserve it?

When he returns, Kingsley is back, and there is a fresh cup of tea waiting for him alongside an open packet of Tesco brand bourbons. The three academics are huddled around Tonks’ computer, and it is clear that something bad is happening.

‘What?’ he asks into the intense silence. Remus looks back at him and holds out his hand; Sirius grasps it and lets Remus pull him closer.

‘Look,’ Remus murmurs, and Sirius sees that they are still looking at the map. He had had this entire map memorised when he was younger, every single name on it, and at night in prison he used to recite it to himself, all the towns down the M4 and down the other motorways too. Remus puts out his other hand and moves it around the screen, following in the path of the road; the screen responds to his touch and moves sideways, east and west, as Remus’s finger does. The road is a dotted line.

‘What?’ Sirius repeats, not understanding.

‘The road is closed,’ Remus says. ‘From Swindon west.’ He looks up at Sirius. ‘They know we’ve gone,’ he says quietly.

Suddenly Tonks jumps, and then reaches into her pocket and withdraws her own telephone. She touches the screen, looks at it for a moment, and says, ‘Fuck. Somebody turn on the BBC.’

Kingsley reaches over to his shelf and grabs some large piece of machinery that he sets up on the desk, then plugs into his own phone. Sirius gives Remus a quizzical look and Remus says, ‘They block the English BBC here in Wales, but we’re so close to the border that we just have to use this signal booster to get around the block.’ Kingsley lays his phone on its side so they can all see the screen and a few seconds later an image resolves:

 

Peter Pettigrew, speaking in front of the Houses of Parliament.

Sirius’s vision goes sort of blurry, and a ringing starts in his ears. Remus’s hand is clutching his so tightly that it hurts, and he grips it back, needing the anchor.

Peter looks older, his face gaunt and his hair thinly thatched across his forehead. One of his jacket sleeves hangs empty.

‘The Met have informed me that just last night there was an assassination threat against my life by the escaped prisoner.’ Peter pauses and looks out at the assembled press, who are all watching him intently, some so caught in the moment that their mouths are open. ‘I think,’ Peter continues, ‘that in light of the serious security threats facing our nation, it is time to consider pardoning Lord Voldemort and asking him to return to government.’

The press explodes, cameras flashing off Peter’s grey-pink face, shouted questions from all sides, but Peter holds up his remaining hand and silence falls instantly. ‘This is a democracy,’ he says, and Tonks snorts, ‘and I will be introducing this topic for debate in the House of Commons tomorrow morning. Thank you.’

‘This is my fault,’ Sirius says, aghast. ‘I should have done it when I had the chance, I should have gotten to Peter-‘

‘Shh,’ Kingsley says, as a commentator appears, visibly excited.

‘Well there you have it, strong statements from several UK First MPs, all calling for Lord Voldemort to be pardoned and returned to government. First we heard from Lucius Malfoy in the House of Lords…’

Sirius turns away as the statement from Malfoy starts playing and walks to look out the window. Below, the lights of Cardiff seem like the stars of a cold, unyielding universe. Sirius shuts his eyes against them as he hears the other three start into an argument.

‘This is precisely why we have to bring this case,’ Kingsley is saying. ‘And we have to bring it now. Imagine if we could destroy Pettigrew’s credibility. The fact that he’s this war hero is partly why people listen to him. If it was just Malfoy-’

‘We’re not ready,’ Tonks bursts in. ‘We need more evidence, we have to make this watertight.’

‘Tonks is right,’ Remus says. ‘Sirius will go back to prison if we do this wrong. And I won’t let that happen.’

‘We can’t have the trial in England,’ Tonks says. ‘They’ll rig it. They’ll never let the truth get out.’

‘I’ve been looking into favourable judges,’ Kingsley says. ‘Feeling them out. I think we have some possibilities.’

Sirius puts his hand on the glass, feeling the cold air through it, trying not to listen any longer. He hadn’t considered any of this. He wants to be in the room with Remus, and Remus alone, and the desire hits him in a strangely intimate way. The others are listening to something else from the BBC, but it sounds tinny and Sirius tunes it out. Then he feels Remus’s hand on his shoulder and he opens his eyes but does not turn. ‘What?’ he asks in an undertone.

‘I think we need to leave,’ Remus says quietly.

Sirius turns and looks at him searchingly. ‘Cardiff?’ He can see Kingsley and Tonks behind him, grim expressions on their faces.

‘I think so,’ Remus says. ‘We’re going to try to get you out of the country.’

Panic sets into Sirius’s stomach. ‘And go where?’ he demands.

‘We’ve got some ideas,’ Kingsley says in that deep, calm voice of his. ‘You two are going to make for Holyhead in a roundabout manner, killing some time in the countryside, and we’ll sort your travel plans and send you the details.’

‘Just for a bit,’ Remus says, looking deeply into Sirius’s eyes. ‘Just for as long as it takes us to finish gathering the evidence we need.’

‘I shouldn’t have come with you,’ Sirius says. ‘I should have tried –’

‘But Sirius, don’t you see, you’re just an excuse,’ Remus interrupts. ‘They’ve been agitating for any reason to pardon him for years. If it wasn’t this, they’d orchestrate a terrorist attack and make the same claim.’

‘Voldemort murdered James and Lily,’ Sirius says to Remus, lips barely moving. ‘He _murdered_ them. He took so long over Lily that he _got caught_.’ Tears are starting in his throat, thick and sharp as knives, this raw wound open inside of him at all times.

‘I know,’ Remus says, and Sirius feels the gravity of it. If he tore Remus open he knows he’d find that same wound, emblazoned over his own heart, and he loves Remus fiercely because of it. ‘Sirius, I can’t pretend to see the future. I don’t know what will happen to us. But.’ He doesn’t take his eyes off of Sirius’s. ‘This is the best thing we can do. You getting killed in the dark because you tried to murder Peter would have set off the exact same reaction.’

Sirius swallows. ‘What if I’d just stayed in prison?’ he whispers.

‘We were preparing to bring the case anyway,’ Remus says. ‘Wouldn’t have mattered, except that you’d be in that hellhole more years.’

‘At least there I only hurt myself.’

Remus blinks and says, ‘Don’t.’

‘They’re scared of you,’ Tonks says, tentative, like she knows she’s intruding into a private conversation. ‘They’re reacting like this because they’re threatened. As hard as that is, it’s good in the long run.’

Remus nods. His hand on Sirius’s arm is steady and warm and strong. Sirius can’t bear the unfamiliar kindness of the other two. He says, ‘Then let’s go.’

They go. Remus refuses to take any kind of major road, instead sticking along the coast. They have time to kill, anyway, as the other two search for a place that might take in Sirius. For two nights, they stay in anonymous bed and breakfasts, sleeping like brothers on uncomfortable twin beds, always a space between them, formal and courteous. Sirius remembers, vividly, what it felt like to long for Remus, then realises that it is because he longs for him again. He settles into it, the familiar ache, and takes what he can – a gentle touch, a kind gesture, a look that seems longer than it should. It is enough.

 

The third night, they get word from Kingsley that they should have safe passage from Holyhead in two days’ time. They are to contact a woman named Hestia and she’ll see that they have everything they need. They can pass through Dublin and from there fly on to Paris. Kingsley has somehow arranged protection for Sirius as a witness from the European Union.

They spend that night in the car because they’ve run out of money, parked near a beach, each in his seat, curled into a ball under a shared blanket. It’s brutally cold anyway. Sirius awakens early in the morning to a fug of frost on the inside of the windscreen and looks at Remus, sleeping on his side, facing Sirius. He’d never expected to have the pleasure of friendship again. He misses the boys in the photograph fiercely but he’s deeply grateful for this.

He gets out of the car as quietly as he can and walks down to the edge of the beach. He thinks of his rebirth on a shore connected by water and land to this shore, not many days ago at all. He dips his hand down into the icy water and scoops up some sand, letting it slide wetly through his hands. The heavy grey dawn sky starts to leak, barely drops at first, but accelerating rapidly into a wild torrent. Sirius gives up on making it to the car without being soaked and stands in it, tilting his head back to let rivulets flow into the hollows of his eyes and mouth. The cold is raw and he draws it into his body, forcing himself not to shiver, but to feel every inch of it, soaking into his clothes and hair. He is nature, wild, open, accepting. For a moment, he has no need of human warmth.

 

The rain abruptly slackens, and he gives it the respect of waiting, letting the final trickles collect in the corners of his lips before he lowers his head. Remus is standing by the car, just watching him, and it takes Sirius several steps closer to realise that Remus is crying.

Inside the car, Remus turns the heater on full and Sirius sits hunched close to the open vents, teeth chattering uncontrollably.

‘I can’t believe I’m free,’ Sirius tries to explain, but Remus hasn’t asked a question. He’s just sniffling and wiping his nose, and now Sirius isn’t sure if he ever was crying, or just cold. ‘The world is so beautiful.’

Remus laughs and runs a hand down Sirius’s face, dragging his wet hair onto his cheek. ‘It is,’ he says, but he’s looking only at Sirius, who shivers, and not just because he’s cold. Remus turns away and says, ‘We’ve got to collect some things in Aberystwyth. Then tomorrow it’s on to the ferry.’ He puts the car into first and eases them out of the sandy soil of the beach and onto the road.

One of the things they get in Aber is money, from Dumbledore. Sirius had almost forgotten their old leader, who had always been distant, but there’s also a letter addressed to him, in which Dumbledore is apologetic for believing Sirius was guilty. That evening, they get another room in a bed and breakfast, this one in Snowdonia, with a mountain view.

After they eat, Sirius decides to shower. He’d forgotten how much he loves this pleasure in life, but once he’s shut the door to the bath he starts to feel panic. Tomorrow, he’s certain, he’ll be on his own, passing into Dublin on the same route they’d taken so many years ago. He feels like he can trace his entire life to that night and the way that Remus’s body had felt pressing into his. He doesn’t want to be alone. He knows it’s too much to ask but he can’t bear the knowledge that tomorrow Remus will leave him. He hopes they’ll see each other as Remus helps make the case against Peter. He also hates having the door closed now, as their minutes together dwindle, and Remus on the other side of it.

Taking a deep breath, Sirius wraps a towel around his waist and steps into the bedroom. ‘Remus…’

Remus is reading something on his phone screen and chewing his lip. He glances up at Sirius, then back at the phone. ‘Hm?’

‘This is going to sound a bit stupid…’

‘Go on…’

‘Having the door shut when I can’t see it is…’ He swallows. ‘It’s making me panic. D’you mind if I shower with it open? Just a bit?’

Remus waves a hand. ‘Please! I’d open a window, but I think the humidity outside will be just as bad if not equal.’

Sirius smiles, relief flooding through him. ‘I’ll turn on the extractor fan.’

The fan is so loud that Sirius can’t hear anything over it and the shower. It’s a nice shower, with a huge shower head that sends down a veritable cascade. Sirius turns up the water as hot as he can and then stands under it, head down, eyes closed, just _feeling_  and _breathing_  and trying to achieve balance. He’s not sure how long he stands there, full minutes passing, just trying to calm himself.

Preparing himself to be alone again.

The shower door opens. Sirius almost yells, but Remus is clambering inside, fully clothed, and without preamble he puts his hands on either side of Sirius’s face and kisses him. Sirius is utterly shocked, and he can feel Remus shaking – vibrating, almost – his hands huge and cool against Sirius’s hot shower-kissed face. Remus breaks away for a second and whispers, ‘Is this – are you –‘

‘It is,’ Sirius agrees, gasping like he’s been running. Remus puts his hand on Sirius’s chest; his glasses are hopelessly fogged. ‘You can’t see!’ Sirius says, inane. He pulls off the glasses and Remus throws back his head and laughs.

‘Put them in the soap dish, but be careful, or we won’t be going far tomorrow!’

Sirius lays them gently atop the narrow bar of soap. ‘Remus…’

‘Yes?’ Remus blinks through the water. He looks nervous for maybe the first time in Sirius’s memory.

‘I’m alive, right?’ Sirius asks. ‘I didn’t die and go to heaven?’

Remus starts laughing again, uproariously, so Sirius kisses him so hard their teeth clash. He wants to shut up Remus’s pretty mouth, and the thought of his cock pressed into it, all wet with saliva and precum and shower water, flashes through his mind. He wants Remus on his knees or he wants to be on his knees in front of Remus, he doesn’t care which or how it happens. He moves his hands up and fists them in the fabric of Remus’s shirt as Remus’s hands move from his face to his bum.

‘Take my fucking clothes off,’ Remus commands him. He takes his hand and presses a finger to Sirius’s lips. As Sirius undoes the buttons of his shirt and then trousers in a single long line down his body, Remus pushes that finger, and then another, and then another, into his mouth, and he takes them all, sucking on them the way he wants to be sucking on Remus’s cock. He peels off Remus’s shirt, tugging Remus’s fingers out of his mouth for just a second to get the sleeve over, only to reclaim them as the shirt slaps wetly on the shower floor. He’s fully hard now, a sensation he hasn’t had in some time, and it’s a sharp ache that makes him want to lose control and grind into Remus’s leg until he can relieve it. Remus runs a hand down Sirius’s chest, letting his fingers, still sticky with saliva, circle around the dark hair below his belly button before dipping down and authoritatively wrapping around his cock. This is a different Remus than he had been thirteen years ago. He wonders how many men Remus has been with and how he’ll compare, but he’s thinking too much with his cock right now to worry about it. He moans and shoves Remus harder into the wall. He runs his hand down the front of Remus’s open trousers and presses his palm against the length of his hard cock, which is caught curving upward and slightly to the side under the thick fabric. Remus gasps against his mouth and hooks a leg around Sirius’s, which doesn’t make Sirius’s attempts to remove his trousers any easier.

‘Why didn’t you take them off first?’ Sirius demands, struggling, wanting to get to Remus’s naked body as fast as he can.

‘Couldn’t wait,’ Remus gasps. ‘Couldn’t even think.’

Sirius fits their mouths together and grinds into him. He’s so close to coming that he feels like he’s entering a tunnel and all he needs to do is keep moving forward to hit that blinding ray of sun at the end of it. He has to slow down or this will be over much too soon. He gets his hands in between the fabric of Remus’s trousers and briefs and the slick skin of his soaked bum and shoves them down, then, rather than come, he drops to his knees, pushes Remus harder against the wall with one hand on his hip bone and takes his cock with his other hand. Remus makes a startled noise just as he runs his thumb up its length and puts it into his mouth. It’s hard, and hot, and tastes like the sea, like freedom on his tongue. He’s always wanted this, since the night after that first day he’d known what he wanted from Remus, lying in bed at school and touching himself, horrified and so fucking aroused by how much he wanted to feel the hot, smooth skin of Remus’s head pressed into his mouth, the shaft slick and tree-trunk hard, like a wild forest thing beyond the rules of man. Now Remus fucks into him and he lets him, wanting it, wanting to take it as hard as he can, wanting his mouth to feel swollen bruised from the pleasure he gives with it. It is even better than he’d imagined.

‘I’m going to come,’ Remus moans, and Sirius encourages him, holding his cock and dragging his hand up and down it in stutters, hitting his mouth with his fist, drawing him further inside his slick mouth. Then Remus does come, and Sirius rides his orgasm, eyes shut, until Remus says, ‘Sirius,’ in a shaky voice. Sirius removes his cock from his mouth with a pop and swallows as Remus slides down the wall of the shower. Hot water is still pouring down over them. ‘Sirius,’ Remus repeats, sliding his hand down Sirius’s face. Sirius grabs the hand and bites gently on Remus’s fingertips. His own cock is heavy against his leg, so close to coming that it’s twitching. Remus puts his hands around Sirius’s bum and drags him forward, Sirius scooting on his knees as Remus relaxes his legs outward, so that Sirius winds up straddling him, his cock dangerously close to Remus’s face. Remus looks up at him, hair plastered to his face from the water and says, ‘Put your cock in my mouth.’

‘Ok,’ Sirius can barely say. Touching himself is almost too much; he feels ready to explode. ‘I’m not going to last,’ he warns him.

Remus smiles like the Cheshire Cat and says, ‘I want to taste you.’

Sirius lifts his cock and pushes it into the burning heat of Remus’s mouth and his tongue, oh, fuck, his tongue, he slumps forward and presses his forehead into the wall of the shower, the hot water beating on his back while Remus drinks him in, so greedy it feels obscene. He feels like he comes for hours, hips pumping in an unconscious rhythm, comes like he’s being reborn and this is what he must shed to complete the transformation.

After a few moments, he manages to stand, staggering back against the wall of the shower. Remus’s clothes are everywhere, a real tripping hazard, and he kicks them out of the way before he takes Remus’s hand and pulls him to his feet. Remus wraps his arms around him, boneless, and then nuzzles in for a salty kiss before turning his head and laying it on Sirius’s shoulder. Sirius squeezes some shampoo into his hand and swirls it through Remus’s hair, massaging his scalp, and Remus lets him, making a low hum of approval. In this moment, Sirius is perfectly content.

After, they climb naked and still a little damp into the bed, turning on their sides to face each other and tangling their legs together.

‘I, um,’ Remus says, and then starts laughing. Sirius loves the way he looks when he laughs: the lines at the sides of his eyes and mouth, the way his eyes seem to glow a little bit.

‘What?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘For what?’

‘This was probably a bit, uhm, sudden.’

‘Yeah,’ Sirius agrees. ‘But.’

‘Yeah,’ Remus agrees. ‘Is it all right?’

‘Yes,’ Sirius says, fervent. Then he settles back and thinks, truly thinks, trying to block out how gorgeous the man in front of him is, and how naked, and how much baggage there is between them. ‘It’s – I’m a – I’m a bit of a mess. And I’m going to be, a bit of a mess. If you want to, I mean, I don’t know if – I don’t want to assume –‘

‘I don’t want this to be a one night stand,’ Remus says quietly. ‘But I also don’t want it to be something that burdens you, or doesn’t allow you to adjust back to life in the world.’

Relief floods through Sirius’s body in a heady rush. He reaches for Remus, who acquiesces instantly, moving forward and letting Sirius wrap his arms around him and kiss him. ‘I don’t – I want this. I want you. I’ve always wanted you.’

Remus kisses him, passionately, in a way that feels imbued with meaning. ‘Sirius,’ he whispers, and Sirius loves the way he says his name, every syllable and vowel of it.

'I loved you so much when we were young,' he whispers against Remus's mouth. 'So, so much.'

'I know,' Remus says, equally quiet. 'I'm sorry we never got to...'

Sirius kisses him more deeply. 'Doesn't matter now,' he breathes. 'You're here, now.'

'I loved you too,' Remus whispers. 'I was such an idiot.'

'Did you really love me?' Sirius leans back and looks up and down at his face, at his eyes, the scars on his cheeks, at his full mouth. 'Peter said...'

'Did Peter tell you what I told him?'

Sirius nods and swallows. 'That it was a mistake,' he whispers.

'What?' Remus sits up so fast that Sirius jumps. 'He told you that?'

‘Yes.’

'Fuck,' Remus says, and then he slams his hand into the wall above the bed. 'Fuck!'

'Stop,' Sirius says, alarmed, reaching for Remus's hand. 'We have to be quiet.'

'Peter fucking lied to you,' Remus says. 'That… fucking... but of course it makes sense.'

'What did you tell him?'

'That I was utterly terrified of what it meant. That I thought it was a lot more than sex. That I was maybe in love with you.'

‘Wow,’ Sirius says, shocked. ‘Remus.’

Remus takes a deep breath and lets Sirius pull him down into the bed again. Sirius tugs the duvet up over their heads so they are in a cocoon world of their own – he used to do this in prison, just to hide from the cameras, but it is totally different to be one of two in this warm, hidden space.

‘I never stopped thinking about you,’ Remus says. ‘Not a day went by…’ He sighs. ‘I should have told you back then.’

‘I was so scared of being gay,’ Sirius admits. ‘I didn’t want anyone to know.’

'I just didn't know how to be gay,’ Remus says. ‘Nothing I saw looked like me. It took me a long time to understand that I just… was.'

Sirius laughs, once, a bark of a laugh. ‘Oh, I realised I was when I saw those protesters in London in our last year of school. I looked at them and I saw who I wished I could be. And then about five minutes later, I realised that I wished I could be one of them with you.’

Remus looks devastated. ‘That long ago? I wish I hadn’t been so stupid.’

‘You knew enough to pull me,’ Sirius points out.

‘I knew you wanted me,’ Remus admits. ‘I wanted to try it out. I was scared of how much I liked it.’

‘James knew,’ Sirius says. ‘He told me he wanted us to be happy.’ He pauses and swallows around the sudden lump in his throat before he can grin. ‘He said he just wanted to be able to take the piss.’

Remus closes his eyes and when he opens them again, they glitter, and he smiles beatifically. ‘I miss them so much,’ he confesses.

‘Yes,’ Sirius agrees, because there has been a gaping hole inside of him since that night and for the first time he’s seen its boundaries and realised that they do exist, that he can ring this part of himself off instead of being subsumed within it. This grief is not, in fact, an endless plain, at least not when Remus is here.

Sometime in the middle of the night, Sirius wakes, his cock hard where it is pressed into the warm, naked cleft of Remus’s bum – they are spooning, and it takes him nearly thirty seconds to place the how and why of being here – and then he instinctively leans forward and kisses a line down Remus’s neck, so that Remus slowly wakens, so that he only knows Remus is awake when he reaches back and takes Sirius’s hand and drags it around to stroke his cock.

‘God I want you to fuck me,’ Remus moans, sending an electric shock straight through Sirius’s body, ‘but I didn’t want to be presumptuous.’

‘What?’ Sirius asks, brain a little short-circuited, already fucking against him.

‘I deliberately did not bring lube or condoms,’ Remus says, ‘because I told myself I wasn’t going to start fucking you.’

Sirius starts giggling hysterically and presses his face into the back of Remus’s neck. ‘Really?’

‘Yes,’ Remus says, a sound of deep suffering. ‘Which was obviously just… I’m normally more in control of myself. I forgot that you’re the exception to that rule.’

‘I can fuck your mouth,’ Sirius suggests in Remus’s ear, delighted at how much fun it is to say something so filthy. He’s filing away the fact that he’s the exception to Remus’s rules for future use.

‘Oh yes,’ Remus agrees. And then somehow Sirius winds up with Remus’s tongue halfway inside his body, coming helplessly everywhere from just a few strokes of Remus’s hand along his shaft, and then he lies back and takes nearly all of Remus’s length into his mouth, unable to stop himself from moaning when Remus comes and drags his heavy cock out of Sirius’s mouth to pulse sticky semen down his chin and neck, where it pools at his collarbone.

‘I wish I’d been yours all these years,’ Sirius says when Remus has wiped him clean and is lying curled against his side.

‘Me too,’ Remus says softly, and presses his face into Sirius’s neck.

Sirius twists his body around so he can wrap a leg around Remus and closes his eyes, breathing in the scent of Remus’s clean hair. This is a terrible idea, and he knows it, but he’s never wanted anything the way he wants this. It feels imperative, like he’ll die without it, but he also knows the fragility of this world and of his own peace.

‘Remus,’ he ventures.

‘Oh god let me sleep before we do that again,’ Remus murmurs. ‘My cock actually hurts from coming too much.’

Sirius starts giggling. ‘I don’t really feel sorry for you.’

‘No,’ Remus agrees, and then he opens his eyes and moves up to lie beside Sirius on the pillow. ‘What is it, love?’

Sirius tries not to sound pathetic. ‘I don’t want to go without you tomorrow.’

‘Sirius.’ Remus finds his eyes with his own and stares at him intensely. ‘You’re not alone anymore.’

‘But I will be.’

‘I’m,’ Remus frowns, ‘wait. Did you think I was just chucking you on the ferry and turning around and going back to London?’

Sirius hesitates. ‘Is that not what you’re doing?’

Remus rolls away from Sirius and retrieves his phone. Not looking at him, he types something on it and then passes it to Sirius. Displayed on the small screen is a news story: ‘UCL History Lecturer Remus Lupin wanted in conjunction with escape of Sirius Black’.

Stricken, Sirius says, ‘Wait, no, Remus, I never intended-‘

‘I knew full well what I was doing,’ Remus says, suddenly fierce. ‘But I can’t go back.’ He stretches towards the bedside table and sets the phone on it, then rolls back and gives Sirius an intense look. ‘We’re in this together now,’ he says. ‘By my choice, entirely. So I hope that’s what you really want.’

Sirius considers it. Life had been easy, in a way, when it was just him. But Remus – Remus has always been good in a fight. ‘Together,’ he says quietly. ‘You and me. I like that.’

They leave early in the morning, setting out in the car on the final leg of the journey. They have some time to kill, and are still avoiding major roadways, so Remus takes a meandering route away from the coast.

‘Do you still know every song on the radio?’ Sirius asks.

‘Maybe.’

Sirius finds BBC Cyrmu and Remus, with zero prompting, belts out a torch song along with the woman singing it, hitting falsetto every few words and terribly out of tune. Sirius loves him with a fierce joy that burns inside of him, illuminating even the darker corners with at least a flicker of light. Remus reaches for his hand and keeps them joined, hands resting in Sirius’s lap until he has to downshift.

‘Wait,’ Sirius says, startled, as Remus pulls into a car park. ‘Is this…?’

‘Shall we go see the Devil’s Bridge?’ Remus asks, a glint of mischief in his eyes.

They walk down the steps. It is raining softly as they observe the three bridges, nattering comfortably, just a couple on a holiday, all the while.

Eventually, Sirius says, ‘I’ll always think of this as the place where we stopped being boys.’ Remus tugs him in closer and wraps his arms around Sirius’s waist, putting his nose into Sirius’s hair by his ear and breathing in deeply. Sirius says, startled, ‘Remus, be careful.’

‘We’re alone here. And anyway, they’re quite tolerant in this country.’

‘Well,’ Sirius says, and he drags Remus’s hands more tightly around himself. ‘Then by all means.’

‘Here’s what I think,’ Remus says a few moments later.

‘Go on.’

‘I don’t think the devil had anything to do with it.’

‘You don’t say,’ Sirius murmurs.

Remus nips his ear, very lightly, before he goes on: ‘What's the purpose of a bridge? To build between two points. To travel a distance. Shakespeare said that journeys end in lovers meeting. So why tear down one bridge, when you can build another?’


End file.
